Nervous Device: A Celebration with Catherine Wagner at City Lights October 30, 2012

Nervous Device: A Celebration with Catherine Wagner at City Lights
Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 7:00 P.M.
City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco

Come celebrate the latest release in the City Lights Spotlight Poetry Series!
In Nervous Device, Catherine Wagner takes inspiration from William Blake's "bou nding line" to explore the poem as a body at the intersection between poet and audience. Using this figure as a model for various sexual, political, and economic interactions, Wagner's poems shift between seductive lyricism and brash fragmentation as they negotiate the failure of human connection in the twilight of American empire. Intellectually informed, yet stubbornly insistent on their own objecthood, and taking a bewildering variety of forms, the poems of Nervous Device express a self-conscious skepticism about the potential for human connection even as they maintain an optimistically charged eroticism. An excerpt appears here.

About Catherine Wagner:
The author of three previous full-length collections, Catherine Wagner was born in Burma during the Vietnam War to American military parents, afterwards living in the Philippines, Indonesia, Yemen, and India before moving to the U.S. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop (where she studied with Jorie Graham and Donald Revell) and a PhD from the University of Utah. She has written criticism on Barbara Guest, Leslie Scalapino and Harryette Mullen, among others, and has published chapbooks with the Dusie collective and other small presses. Her poems appear in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry and Out of Ev erywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK, among other anthologies. She's currently an Associate Professor of English at Miami University in Ohio.

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