Danger Days

by Catherine Pierce

The poems in Catherine Pierce’s new Danger Days celebrate our planet while also bearing witness to its collapse. In poems steeped deep in the 21st century, Pierce weaves superblooms and Legos, gun violence and ghosts, glaciers and contaminant masks, urging us to look closely at both the horror and beauty of our world. As Pierce writes in “Planet,” “I’m trying to see this place even as I’m walking through it.”

Genres: Poetry, Climate Change

120 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2020

About the author

Catherine Pierce served as the Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2021-2025 and is the author of four books of poems: Danger Days (2020), The Tornado Is the World (2016), The Girls of Peculiar (2012), and Famous Last Words (2008), all from Saturnalia Books. Each of her most recent three books won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize; Famous Last Words won the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Two new books are forthcoming in 2026: a memoir, Foxes for Everybody, from Northwestern University Press, and a poetry collection, Dear Beast, from Saturnalia.

Pierce’s poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, New England Review, FIELD, Pleiades, Gettysburg Review, and the 2019 and 2021 Pushcart Prize anthologies. Her essays appear in The New York Times, Ecotone, The Rumpus, The Millions, Cincinnati Review, and River Teeth. In 2019, she was named a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, and in 2022 she was selected as an Academy of American Poets’ Laureate Fellow.

From 2007-2024, Pierce was professor of English and co-director of the creative writing program at Mississippi State. She recently moved with her family back to her home state of Delaware, where she runs Studio & Craft, a poetry community, and continues to write, teach, and spend as much time outside as possible.

Reviews

[Chenoa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came across Anthropocene Pastoral when I was searching for poems about climate change for my public health course - then immediately ordered the book. (And sent the poem to my therapist.) Climate change brings such huge grief that it’s hard to let the grief in - it feels overwhelming. I love that so many of Pierce’s poems let me touch it for a moment, then move back to being present with what is, for now, still here.

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful book. I love Pierce's wit and wisdom, her big-hearted poems that open up to contain it all--the elms and skyscrapers, the plastic bags and the egrets. These poems dazzle in their gratitude and honesty. They are also full of the deep planetary grief of climate crisis. They are hopeful and yet not so sunny-eyed as to be syrupy--they are too smart for that. If you want poems that will give you balm as you carry the weight of a dying world inside you, these poems will offer that. And more.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I kept getting big hits of Gerald Stern and Ross Gay while reading this volume. There's a lovely mix of gratitude, wonder, and preemptive sorrow for the coming losses of our bodies and those of our loved ones and most saliently, our planet. Favorite poems:

Inheritance (love the repetition of the line, "We remember, is what I'm saying," referring to heat waves or other climate extremes, which used to be anomalies)

Entreaty (love the opening lines in particular)

Spaceship Earth (the cool thing about this is I read it on 9/13/22, after having just visiting EPCOT for the first time on Sept 12 and experiencing the ride in the poem)

In Early Motherhood I Lay Down Like a Cat Each Night, (love the wired way she writes about being a new mom)

Abecederian for the Dangerous Animals (impressive)

I Kept Getting Books About Birds (these lines remind me of Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer": "They were so dull [the books], with their migration/pattern charts and seed particulars,/and I knew as I looked at the congregating/backyard starlings or whatever they were/that the only real solution was to walk outside/and startle them so that they rose in one/of their gorgeous rivers, one of their gorgeous/bed sheets, one of their gorgeous/choreographies of shadow")

Poem for Right Now (I dig the way the poem conveys how it is possible to love and constructively criticize at the same time, in this case, I think the speaker is referring to the policies of one's country. Love these lines: "Watch me hold/a decade-ago snow night, moon-bright/and silent, right next to my hammering rage." And later, "I am poorly oiled, but every day I creak/awake again.")

[Kelsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the author's earlier collection, Famous Last Words. There are some wonderful poems in this collection, too, but as a whole, I couldn't shake that the poems in this book were too polished for my liking. I wanted some roughness. I wanted to feel the speaker losing control. I wanted the danger in Danger Days.

[Katie • forevermorepages · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the most influential poetry book I've ever read, but I really admire the way Catherine Pierce uses words. Her poetry is very visceral and I really liked it.

[Margo Hollingsworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a beautiful collection of poems. Catherine Pierce is now my favorite poet. You heard it here first.

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

At this point I think I might do anything for Catherine Pierce.

[Heather Truett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a bit of a Pierce fan-girl at this point. This is my 3rd volume by her and she recently visited the poetry workshop I am currently in for my MFA program. In this volume, I have read and reread the motherhood/astronaut poem so many times. I insisted on reading it out loud to my class when we discussed the book and then gushed about it for a while.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's not often that you find someone saying exactly the things you could never find the words for. I absolutely love this collection - it expresses so much that I feel living in 2021, in a world careening towards ecological disaster and making no attempts to stop it. I was blown away the first time I read Catherine Pierce's poetry, but this book somehow managed to bowl me over even more. Easily among my top reads of the year already.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

I dog-eared so many of these frank and sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking poems. Written from the perspective of a mother grappling with the paradox of raising curious new people on what feels like a struggling, dying planet, they are perfect for our time. ⁣