momentum

Foreword by Baron Wormser
ForeWord Book of the Year Bronze Award 2004
Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist 2005

Those moments in childhood that shape who we will become, and all that will come to define our lives, dominate the poems that Catherine Doty has collected in her debut volume. With humor, affection and a sharp awareness of the larger truths that can be found even in the mundane, Doty explores the luminous, sometimes curious relics of memory.

Catherine Doty is a poet and educator from Paterson, New Jersey. She is the author of two collections of poetry: momentum (CavanKerry, 2004) and Wonderama (CavanKerry, 2021). She has received prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. An MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has taught for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Frost Place, and the New York Public Library, among others. Her poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies.

Outboard

A drinking buddy gave our dad an outboard motor.
Dad kept it, up to its orange chin in bilge,
in an oil drum, up in the yard, and, after a few,
he’d go out and start it up, yelling, Get back,
you kids!—but we were already back, and ready to bolt
if the green plastic men we’d thrown in up and busted the
thing.
But no tiny, acid-stripped skeletons churned to the surface;
the army remained at rest with the worms and the pear
cores.
All that spring, when he felt good, he’d go watch his
motor,
his nostrils straining to catch each oily fume,
a Chesterfield dropping ash down the front of his work
shirt.
Once Shaky Louie, his pal, braved the terrible sunlight
to join him in motor watching, and, chatty by nature,
told us Dad had said soon that our freezer’d be so full of
trout
there wouldn’t be room left for even one skinny Popsicle.
By August we’d scrawled ss dad on the slimy oil drum,
but he never noticed, just stood in the din, smoking,
staring.
He never did lug that motor out of the oil drum—
he let winter do in the only toy he had, though it spat
muddy rainbows and roared like a locomotive,
and gave off the piercing and molten stink of hope.

. . . a book of intense and affectionate metaphor. There are “dust storms/in the canister of sugar,” aquariums evolve inevitably into “twenty-five gallons of well-lit bouillabaisse,” and her father’s revving of an outboard motor mounted in an oil drum says all that can be said about going nowhere. The magical and the daily keep turning vividly into each other, and Doty can hardly decide which she loves more.
— James Richardson

At its best, poetry manages the feat of being unerring and fallible at the same time, of communicating a simultaneous sense of the rich shakiness of the present moment and the hard weight of the past. Over and over, Catherine Doty succeeds in poems that are engaging, shrewd and brimming with actual feeling. When I write “actual” I mean neither emotionally tethered nor shouting but willing to endure and celebrate the real emotional skeins and stains that constitute real lives. She has the knack and she knows how to use it.
— Baron Wormser

Employing brief, almost journalistic sketches punctuated by passionate language, Doty creates a virtual photo album that begins in 1960s Paterson, New Jersey . . . Personal as her poems are, they have the power to evoke memories in anyone who has ever been a child. Recalling her childhood home in Paterson, Doty celebrates those small, seemingly insignificant details that define not just a space but a life . . .
— The New York Times

October 2004
68 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.5
$14
978-0-9723045-0-4