The speakers of Oracle occupy the outer-borough cityscape of New York's Staten Island, where they move through worlds glittering with refuse and peopled by ghosts-of a dead lover, of a friend lost to suicide, of a dog with glistening eyes. Marvin's haunting, passionate poems explore themes of loss, of the vulnerability of womanhood in a world hostile to it, and of the fraught, strangely compelling landscape of adolescence.

About the Author
Cate Marvin is the author of Fragment of the Head of a Queen and World's Tallest Disaster. A winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize and a Whiting Award, her poetry has been published in the Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, and elsewhere. A cofounder of VIDA and a professor of English at CUNY, she lives in Maplewood, New Jersey.

Reviews
"Poems finely tuned ... full of inventive echoes and spring-loaded syntax." -- Dialogist "She takes no prisoners." -- NPR "Intense and intimate." -- Rumpus "Channels the colorful voices of Staten Island." -- Vanity Fair "Spectral, charged poems: a wild, ferocious bunch capable of emotional darkness, bound by a strong poetic I ... a successful call to arms." -- Publisher's Weekly "These are poems of feeling, memory, and calamity, of a life lived near the edge and an edge that nevertheless always resolves itself into a haunting ethical music. This is a wonderful collection of poems. It makes a powerful claim on the reader at every turn, on every page." -- Eavan Boland



Book Information
ISBN 9780393353136
Author Cate Marvin
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint WW Norton & Co
Publisher WW Norton & Co
Weight(grams) 84g
Dimensions(mm) 211mm * 140mm * 8mm