Seven Floors Up Nominated for

The Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize

The Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award.

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Now available through major booksellers, including Amazon.com.

Mending Her Wedding Gown She Questions Domestic Notions
 

When was the last time you took thread's
end in your mouth to wet it, guided
it through the slit and pulled
until its midsection straddled
metal, a hair's breadth hidden
by the eye's shiny tunnel?

When was the last time you dangled
the needle, held thread's ends,
looped them, slipped them loose
through the O they made, tightened
the noose's primitive knot?

When was the last time you stitched
the needle through a yardage skin, diving,
resurfacing, under and over,
under and over, until your measured
strokes brought shore, repaired
the wake of a tear?

When was the last time you pinched
the needle, mended a dropped
hem, a split seam, on a dress
you wore when the world ran
its eye around you?

When was the last time you pushed
the needle to the other side,
found a plush pad, a scarlet bead
crowning the cushion like a red pinhead
lodged in the fabric of your thumb?

When was the last time you clipped
the needle free with your teeth, scrapped
loosed thread, housed the needle
in its paper bed?

When was the last time that you bled?

                ~ from Seven Floors Up

Praise for Seven Floors Up:

As in some paranoic dream, in Cati Porter's powerful debut collection, "everything's a sign"---the scrabble tiles spelling out clandestine family tensions, the glazed eyes of porcelain lobsterware revealing her craftsman grandfather, the dictionary definitions of "mum" defining cycles of sexual violence and enforced silence. Through E-Bay ads for an inflatable church, labels stuck to her preschool son's jeans, instructions for preconception gender selection, and childhood games, Porter names herself into the world with lyrical irony in poem after hilariously tragic poem. Follow her through the "bourbon-hinged jangling dancing open door" seven floors up to visit the kitchen of the soul. There are madwomen in that attic, but the booze is good, and they really know how to cook.

- Tony Barnstone, author of The Golem of Los Angeles, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award for Poetry (Red Hen Press, 2008 )

Seven Floors Up you will find a complicated and gifted poet, Cati Porter, whose art is filled not only with heart and mind - but also with the body in its varied and rich incarnations. Here's a poet speaking as wife, lover, mother, daughter, woman, artist and thinker, whose grateful, and still often rueful, poems remind us that it's in our messy everyday entanglements, in our obligations and aspirations, amidst our fears and demons that we forge meaning. But don't be fooled. Although these are the poems of a young wife and mother Porter has range. She can write "Marriage as a Board Game" and "Elegy for My Mothers (Who Are Not Dead)", and then give us a sharp and insightful poem about an inflatable church available for purchase on eBay. She can write "In My Hand a Photograph Of Where He Is Not" with its compressed picture of loss and shock and then use a children's game ("Mother May I") to document the changing of the generational guard. Porter even turns her wry eye on the opportunities science provides - don't miss "Oogenesis, Or ‘Welcome to the Vagina!'." Reading this book is like being at a party when a truly smart and funny person walks through the door. "Thank goodness she's here," you think, "Now we'll have some fun."

- Deborah Bogen, author of Landscape With Silos, winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize (Texas Review Press, 2005)

This necessary book comes to us straight from "the kitchen of the soul," where the details of daily life--a sick dog's diet, an inflatable church up for bidding on eBay-are transformed from the domestic into the mythic. Cati Porter's fascination with language and deeply-felt passion are seasoned with a welcome humor that makes this book a joy to read. Admirable in its range--whether pantoum, sestina, abecedarium, or deft free verse--and penetrating in its wisdom, Seven Floors Up is a collection to be treasured.

- Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Unmentionables (W. W. Norton, 2008 )