Catherine Wagner’s poems in Macular Hole have elicited resounding, answering calls from several continents. "These are poems of sex and identity, poems of spleen and craving, poems of grim energy and outspoken crisis. I love them. I am bored by so many of America's new bloods but this woman can write. Her neo-surreal vision and neo-dada attitude are matched by an exceptional feel for the magic of simple language—her poems organically grow down the page without effort, every line seeming right. She manages this by infusing every new image (and every repetition) with a corresponding voice posture. Very American, very urban, very modern and yet harking back to the best 'beat' legacies."—Josephine Ebert, U.K. poetry critic. Here in the United States, Rae Armantrout has this to say: "Jack Spicer's Martians are back, but now they're talking wild girl-talk. In Catherine Wagner's Miss America, public and private collide in a new way, like matter and anti-matter. This is a conflagration. "That is damage talk," she says, "Want to watch me/Make it. " And I do. In fact, if I died, I might want to come back as Catherine Wagner." Such enthusiastic identifications don’t come cheap: Wagner’s poems are worth their weight in flesh and gold.

CATHERINE WAGNER was born to missionary parents in Burma and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. Wagner is a graduate of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and the University of Utah’s Ph.D in Literature program. She is the author of Macular Hole (Fence Books) and Miss America(Fence).