Delta

Caitlin Johnson’s Delta offers her readers a vision, at once both poetic and scientific, that serves to encourage and echo forward our calling to pay close attention to the world nearest us and the people with whom we surround ourselves. The collection offers a poetics of place, putting landscape, memory, and nature in conversation with ideas about war, history, chemistry (both scientific and romantic), and the canon. Her poems capture loss and joy, and invite readers to consider the ways our bodies, minds, and even souls are shaped by our space and our time. Her trilogy of poems featuring Joan of Arc, especially, highlights Johnson’s ability to reflect truths, to create visions, and to embrace voices otherwise overlooked. I find her work engaging, exciting, and tense-in the best possible way. Each line, each image, each stanza is taut with meaning and significance, without relying on laborious or overwrought tones. Note the layered impact of her collection’s title: Delta, with meanings related to science, mathematics, Classical culture, military culture, as well as Southern spaces. Cate’s work consistently rewards multiple readings, varied considerations, and the careful, deliberate, and joyful approach of a reader looking for new ideas in conversation with old, elemental spaces.[Kristi Pope Key, Director of Academic Services, Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts]***Caitlin Johnson’s Delta takes on a variety of subjects and themes-artistic, literary, scientific, and social-in a bold voice that is also darkly funny. She isn’t like Plath, Sexton, or Parker; she is herself, but these poets come to mind. Interwoven throughout the book are lyrics inspired by the periodic table; snapshots of U.S. cities that convey place in just a few lines; ruminations on historical and literary figures-Joan of Arc, Macbeth-sympathetic but unsentimental portraits of soldiers; and (among my favorites) love and anti-love poems. 'Letter to the Stepdaughter I Might Have Had' addresses a 'you' who 'hate[s] me. I can respect that,' in the voice of someone who may be too fiercely independent for the role of wife. In 'Disappearances,' an ex-lover 'smelled of nothing- / nothing, & I wonder / if he existed at all. In Delta, Johnson distills her wide reading and life observations with candor and wit.[Deborah Diemont, author of The Charmed House and Diverting Angels]***Reading Delta is like walking into a boudoir with a shattered mirror, its pieces reflecting those of us left brittle, breaking, and told to like it when men play with edged tools and cut their own fingers. Lonely travelers will recognize themselves in these poems even as the poet takes the broken pieces and cuts delicately into our unsuspecting hearts.[Lisa Hosokawa Garber, author of Crosswind]