Theme & Variations: Poems in Four Movements (Bethany Catlin-Johnson)
Bethany Catlin writes in her preface to "Theme & Variations: Poetry in Four Movements" : In the U.S., we are usually in a moment of reckoning and this one is no different. Americans are obsessed with land and what it means to have it, and these poems seek to understand what it is that one small person can claim. This collection explores the particularity of America’s most generic background: being from a small town in the Midwest. Like most such explorations, it’s a story of coming of age, but it’s also about how the fact that coming into one’s own means losing more and more of the borders that tell you that you are distinctly anything at all. The best way to read these works is to remember the last time you had to drive somewhere in the Midwest to a remote barn for somebody else’s wedding, and rely on the landmarks to orient and ground you as different ideas of what it means to be one person and not another float past.
Bethany Catlin writes in her preface to "Theme & Variations: Poetry in Four Movements" : In the U.S., we are usually in a moment of reckoning and this one is no different. Americans are obsessed with land and what it means to have it, and these poems seek to understand what it is that one small person can claim. This collection explores the particularity of America’s most generic background: being from a small town in the Midwest. Like most such explorations, it’s a story of coming of age, but it’s also about how the fact that coming into one’s own means losing more and more of the borders that tell you that you are distinctly anything at all. The best way to read these works is to remember the last time you had to drive somewhere in the Midwest to a remote barn for somebody else’s wedding, and rely on the landmarks to orient and ground you as different ideas of what it means to be one person and not another float past.
Bethany Catlin writes in her preface to "Theme & Variations: Poetry in Four Movements" : In the U.S., we are usually in a moment of reckoning and this one is no different. Americans are obsessed with land and what it means to have it, and these poems seek to understand what it is that one small person can claim. This collection explores the particularity of America’s most generic background: being from a small town in the Midwest. Like most such explorations, it’s a story of coming of age, but it’s also about how the fact that coming into one’s own means losing more and more of the borders that tell you that you are distinctly anything at all. The best way to read these works is to remember the last time you had to drive somewhere in the Midwest to a remote barn for somebody else’s wedding, and rely on the landmarks to orient and ground you as different ideas of what it means to be one person and not another float past.