Cat’s Tongue: Poems
Kathleen Winter
TRP Chapbook Series
Cat’s Tongue is the latest publication from California-based writer Kathleen Winter, author of three award-winning poetry collections. Armed with wit, charm, and original imagery, she engages with incidents in her Texas youth that range from traumatic to ecstatic—strewing oilfields, deer, drug dealers, and football games in between. These poems vary widely in style and subject matter, but they share precisely crafted language and this writer’s unique perspective on a central Texas childhood.
“In Kathleen Winter’s new collection, Cat’s Tongue, memory is a thing to encounter untamed, to be rediscovered and confronted before it’s lost again. These poems ‘go backwards / in experience, subtracting yes from yes’ as they unearth secrets and regrets and yearnings, as they reckon the past with the present. Through the glint and gloom of memory, these poems portray the self in all its strength and grief, all with Winter’s trademark keenness and lyrical grace.”
—W. Todd Kaneko, author of This Is How the Bone Sings
Kathleen Winter’s poetry collections include: Transformer (The Word Works 2020); I will not kick my friends (Elixir 2018); and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past (Elixir 2012). She was granted the Texas Institute of Letters’ Ralph Johnston Fellowship and Bob Bush Memorial Award, the Elixir Prize, the Antivenom Prize, and Poetry Society of America’s The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award. Her poems and short fiction appear in The New Republic, New Statesman, Agni, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Five Points and Poetry London. She was awarded fellowships at Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Dora Maar House and James Merrill House.
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