Fieldglass

"Pond’s scintillating debut examines family history, female friendship, geography, and sexual identity in poems of startling craft and vision. Throughout, poems accumulate and echo off one another, unveiling a distinctive and highly perceptive queer identity on the page."—Publishers Weekly

“With this single breathtaking debut, Catherine Pond has earned her place among the most powerful, visionary, and inventive poets of her generation. Her poetry, with its visceral lyric grace and nuanced modulations, recalls the work of a young Louise Glück in its naked disquiet, its sense of imagistic reflection, and its arresting beauty. Often gestural, elliptical, and devastating, Pond’s poems assemble into luminous constellations of echoing loss. Gripping Fieldglass in your hands, it is impossible ever to look away.”—David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: Selected and New Poems
 
“The poems in Fieldglass are astonishing in their honesty, and I devoured their fearlessness greedily. Pond charts fantasy, family, and the painful trust and powerful abandonments that teach us what love is. Concise, lyrical, and rife with compelling turns, this book brings the world close and helps you see it, helps you know it, helps you bear its truths.”—Traci Brimhall, author of Rookery and Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod
 
“What is the syntax of longing? The speaker of Pond’s debut collection conjures earthquakes, partial moons, and the mild lakes of her childhood. We witness the phantasmic powers of Pond’s imagination, a poet who spots horse teeth baring in the mist and feels the centrifugal pull of a sinister darkness. Amidst these dimensions of desire and apparition, Pond reveals the geography of a theatrical unconscious. Elegant and unsettling, the poems remake the reader and offer us an emotional complexity that we desperately need.”—Megan Fernandes, author of Good Boys
 
“At once Greek in its fatalism and, increasingly, all-American in its faith in self-determination, Fieldglass speculates its way through clouds of complex family dynamics, sexual trauma, and extreme agape in order to be beaten in the end into a depth of self-knowledge that is sister to wisdom and predawn of strength. ‘Nothing ever really breaks,’ Pond writes, ‘though force can cause a flexible object to deform.’ One of the many gifts of this brilliant collection is to remind us that deformation like this produces not necessarily a compromise to identity but, often, the fullest realization of it.”—Timothy Donnelly, author of The Problem of the Many

“Where Fieldglass stands apart from its peers […] is in Pond’s ease with retrospective narrative. Confident in themselves and in the force of the experiences they relate, these poems possess a clarity as impactful as it is rare, in first books at least; Fieldglass seems refreshingly immaculate, in other words, of the ludic, deliberately weird writing that characterizes many debuts, including some of the most celebrated.”—Preposition