Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced
Catherine Barnett
2003 Beatrice Hawley Award
2004 Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers
2004 Whiting Writers' Award
The family response to the sudden deaths of the speaker’s two young nieces is at the center of Catherine Barnett’s award-winning first collection. This series of elegies records the transit of grief, observing with an unflinching eye how a singular traumatic event can permanently alter our understanding of time, danger, the material world, and family. Marked by clarity and restraint, these lyric poems narrate a suspenseful, wrenching story that explores the depths and limits of empathy.
"Catherine Barnett's indelible first book, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, has a long fore-life and comes to us as a work of full maturity....Barnett's poems are scrupulously restrained and beautifully made, though the speaker in them is at times wild and even crazed with feeling, unappeased by sorrow."
—Edward Hirsch in The Washington Post
"Catherine Barnett's book records what is an essential human dignity enacted. In a way that only poetry could have done it, this book makes you understand that everything is secondary to love."
—Robert Wrigley
"The book reaches no final conclusion or healing, in fact it almost says nothing bigger than '... I see it's not all gray' in the final poem, 'River'. But it manages to document real emotion and the workings of the human mind in a clever, uncontrived and genuinely surprising way which is quietly innovative and new."
—Stride Magazine
"These heart-breaking poems of an all too human life stay as absolute as the determined craft which made them. There is finally neither irony nor simple despair in what they record. Rather, it is the far deeper response of witness, of recognizing what must be acknowledged and of having the courage and the care to say so."
—Robert Creeley
“If death could be undone by love—that deathless human wish—if death could be undone by formidable mindfulness and immaculate craft, these poems would revive the dead. The miracle they do work is nearly of that scale: they forge, and forge on our behalf, a model of the soul.”
—Linda Gregerson
“In Catherine Barnett’s exquisite collection, profound grief and courage find their enactment in essential poems. This is work of the highest integrity, generous and luminous. Barnett’s lines are honed in the service of a truth which remains unknown—to use the words of Jaime Sabines, ‘everything happens in silence/the way light is made in the eye.’”
—Dennis Nurkse
“Catherine Barnett has written here a very extraordinary 'first book': a tactful, restrained, passionate study of grief, almost a novel in its telling/singing of one heartbreaking story. Its classical, egoless voice will be company to many in these (any) dark days. I close the book still hearing the lost girls ask come with us— come with us—.”
—Jean Valentine
about the author
Catherine Barnett won the 2003 Beatrice Hawley Award for her first collection of poems, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, which was published by
Alice James Books in May 2004. Her honors include a 2004 Whiting Writers Award, the 2004
Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, a 2005 Pushcart Prize, and a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. Her work has
appeared in The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades,
Barrow Street, Shenandoah, Interim, The Hat, and The Washington Post. She
teaches creative writing at NYU and lives in New York City.
Author photo by Cal Barnett-Mayotte
two poems from into perfect spheres such holes are pierced
