Catherine Bowman

Catherine Bowman (born in El Paso, Texas) is an American poet.

Her most recent poetry collection is Can I Finish, Please? (Four Way Books, 2016), and her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The Best American Poetry, TriQuarterly, River Styx, Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Los Angeles Times, Crazyhorse, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review, and in six editions of The Best American Poetry. Her honors include fellowships from Yaddo and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She collaborates regularly with composer and bassist John Lindberg, and they have performed and taught workshops at venues in North America and Europe. Bowman is a full professor in the Creative Writing Program at Indiana University, and also teaches at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

Full-length poetry collections

Anthologies edited

"'I want words meat-hooked from the living steer,' Lowell wrote, as if foreseeing 1-800-hot-ribs, the debut collection by Catherine Bowman, a skilled young poet who seems to manipulate the language with a branding iron in one hand and a bullwhip in the other. Bowman’s native soil is Texas, and though she casts a cold eye on its codes of Bubba Machismo and Cheerleader Femininity, she knows that denying one’s roots is equivalent to using a butcher’s cleaver to perform an act of self-amputation. She also knows how thin the line between Bubba and the Cheerleader really is."

"Catherine Bowman’s Notarikon fills its reader with a profound sense of the obscure, of the million tiny, sticky acts of irreverence that constitute an individual’s window to the world. She quilts together all the minutiae that make a neighbor, a marriage, or a vacation, to name a few. Her own ability to systematize images and information fascinates her, and the book’s title reflects this fascination appropriately: “Notarikon” is a Kabbalist term for making new words out of the first and last letters of other words in holy texts."

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Wikipedia