Catherine
Meng (USA)
1975
Catherine
Meng was born in Teaneck, New Jersey and raised in Newton, Massachusetts.
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She received her B.A. in Creative Writing
from the College of Santa Fe, a certificate in Culinary Arts from Boston
University, and her M.F.A in Creative Writing from the University of Montana,
Missoula.
She has resided in Berkeley, California
for the past nine years. With Lauren Levin and Jared Stanley she co-edits the
poetry journal Mrs. Maybe.
Meng's poetry has appeared in numerous
journals including Carve, Crowd, Combo, The Boston
Review, Fence, Fulcrum, Jubilat, Shampoo, and Slope.
Her first collection of poems, Tonight's
the Night was published in 2007 by Apostrophe Books. She also has three
chapbooks: 15 Poems in Set of Five, Dokument, and Lost
Notebook w/ Letters to Deer. In 2013 she published as second book of
poetry, The Longest Total Solar Eclipse of the Century.
BOOKS
OF POETRY
Tonight's
the Night
(Apostrophe Books, 2007), The Longest Total Solar Eclipse of the Century (SplitLevel
Texts, 2013)
╬Winner
of the PIP Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry in English
2005-2006
The
Circle of the Fifths
The
works tastes overwhelmed, like alert palms flanking a full highway.
How
you find the grit later in your mouth & wake into
your
own enormity. How the work takes an unexpected amount of right turns
that
run into the darkness & peter out under abandoned bridges.
To
the Massachusetts from which I come, my brother-county racked by cobblestones
that
left me sprained, I leave my brain
infused
with slick bottom stones where three rivers converge. Men in hip-boots
pull
breaching trout from the surface.
The
work is as barbarous as bookends. Waterspouts deviated by a tough wind,
as
if we could jump up into our wings, hold a pitch to the point of ownership
&
scatter as sure as light.
Though
I was willingly broken by the grandeur, I made not one exception,
too
taken by a trumpet taking stabs at Gershwin, the faults & repeats passing
in
on a breeze. Yet I was often awakened by a horrid kind of surprise
into
my primary image (a small brook that borders a deaf school).
Having
worked a summer holiday for belladonna, I thought my sight was proof.
I
believed all the endings curved into the choirmaster’s slender fingers
which
formed a closed circle against the darkened faces of the crowd.
Yet
I stared at a map for a year & could only remember the colors of countries.
The
work followed me like the carcasses of roadkill I counted while passing
through
Colorado. Two days in, the toll mounted to unhumorous heights. 284
was
lifted from the asphalt by a hawk just before the grille of the car. The work
was
like that, both skyward and lifeless.
_____
Reprinted
from Boston Review, XXX, no. 6 (November/December 2005). Copyright ©2005
by Catherine Meng.
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