Danger Days

Author: Catherine Pierce

Publisher: Saturnalia (2020)

The poems in Catherine Pierce's new Danger Days celebrate our planet while also bearing witness to its collapse. In poems steeped deep in the 21st century, Pierce weaves superblooms and Legos, gun violence and ghosts, glaciers and contaminant masks, urging us to look closely at both the horror and beauty of our world. As Pierce writes in "Planet," "I'm trying to see this place even as I'm walking through it."

"Danger Days boldly confronts political and ecological collapse head-on—and shows us that poetry has the ability both to chronicle and battle back the apocalypse, with brilliantly rendered moments of beauty, wonder, love, and sly humor. Pierce takes on lockdown drills, spiders, violent storms, carcinogens, toxic algae blooms, tender-age shelters, retreating glaciers, horror movies, dangerous animals and even quicksand—and weaves them into luminous odes to humanity and domesticity in the Anthropocene, giving us a way to muddle through. 'Darling,' she writes, 'here is a sky polluted / with our city. Kiss me under it.'"

—Erika Meitner