Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Tornado Is the World
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://catherinepierce.wordpress.com/
CITY: Starkville
STATE: MS
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.english.msstate.edu/faculty/pierce.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2003055176
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2003055176
HEADING: Pierce, Catherine, 1978-
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040 __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC |d DLC
053 _0 |a PS3616.I347
100 1_ |a Pierce, Catherine, |d 1978-
670 __ |a Pierce, Catherine. Animals of habit, 2004: |b CIP t.p. (Catherine Pierce) data sheet (b. Apr. 25, 1978)
953 __ |a lh38
PERSONAL
Born April 25, 1978.
EDUCATION:Susquehanna University, B.A. 2000; Ohio State University, M.F.A., 2003; University of Missouri, Ph.D., 2007.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Mississippi State University, associate professor and co-director of the creative writing program, 2007—.
AWARDS:Winner, Wick Chapbook Competition, for Animals of Habit; Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, for Famous Last Words; two Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prizes, for The Girls of Peculiar and The Tornado Is the World, respectively.
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, 2011 and 2015. Contributor of poems to periodicals and Website, including Slate, Boston Review, Ploughshares, FIELD, A Public Space, Ninth Letter, Court Green, and Crab Orchard Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Poet Catherine Pierce earned his bachelor of arts degree at Susquehanna University in 2000, and she completed her master of fine arts degree at Ohio State University three years later. Pierce continued her academic career at the University of Missouri, where she finished her doctorate in 2007. Since then, Pierce has served as associate professor and co-director of the creative writing program at Mississippi State University. Her poems have appeared in such periodicals and Websites and Slate, Boston Review, Ploughshares, FIELD, A Public Space, Ninth Letter, Court Green, and Crab Orchard Review. Discussing her work in the online Setonian, Pierce told Zachary Wohl: “I’m drawn to the craft element of making poems, the actual building process, the maddening and satisfying puzzle of trying to shape language into meaning.”
This ethos can be seen in all of Pierce’s poetry collections, beginning with her 2004 chapbook Animals of Habit, which won the Wick Chapbook Competition. Pierce’s first full-length collection, Famous Last Words, followed in 2008, and it was awarded the Saturnalia Poetry Prize. With her 2012 collection, The Girls of Peculiar, Pierce garnered a Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize. Her 2016 collection, The Tornado is the World, garnered the Mississippi Institute Prize again, and the books explores the terror of a tornado and its aftermath. From everyday anxieties, to true life-threatening terror, Pierce examines the tornado as a force for change, for creation as well as destruction. Some of the poems in the collection are written from the point of view of the tornado, but it portrays a mother and father as they throw their bodies over their infant son to protect him from the gale.
Pierce explained the difference between The Tornado is the World and her earlier books in a Best American Poetry interview. “For one thing, this one was more personal,” she stated. “My family and I did have a very close call with a tornado, and I was working in this book to translate the terror of that experience to the page. And yet this book also draws more on persona and narrative invention than my other books, so there’s a balance there.” Indeed, as Pierce moves between the tornado and all who encounter it. She also offers several first-person poems that explore the speaker’s attempts (failed and otherwise) to appreciate life and all of its fleeting aspects. Thus, the collection moves from a sense of terror to a sense of wonder.
As the author noted in Best American Poetry, “the biggest challenge of writing from the point of view of the tornado was trying to maintain some degree of empathy for it. The tornado is the villain of the book, but villains don’t usually see themselves as villains, of course, so I tried to imagine how a tornado might justify its destruction to itself.” Pierce went on to note: That was tough at times. In terms of giving voice to all the different characters—some of them, like the mother, or the teenager, are or have been me, at least to some degree, so those didn’t require much in the way of transmutation; for the others I was working under the same principle I followed in writing the tornado—trying to embody them, even the less obviously sympathetic ones, with empathy.”
Praising the author’s efforts in Publishers Weekly, a critic announced that The Tornado is the World “confronts various forms of fear and anxiety that can intrude on one’s seemingly placid and satisfied.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, November 21, 2016, review of The Tornado Is the World.
ONLINE
Best American Poetry, http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/ (August 21, 2017), author interview.
Catherine Pierce Website, https://catherinepierce.wordpress.com (August 21, 2017).
Mississippi State University Website, http://www.english.msstate.edu/(August 21, 2017), author profile.
Setonian, http://www.thesetonian.com/(August 21, 2017), Zachary Wohl, author interview.*
Catherine Pierce is the author of three books of poems: The Tornado Is the World (Saturnalia 2016), The Girls of Peculiar (Saturnalia 2012), and Famous Last Words (Saturnalia 2008), winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Both The Tornado Is the World and The Girls of Peculiar won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize. A chapbook, Animals of Habit (Kent State University Press), was published in 2004. Catherine Pierce’s poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry (2015 and 2011), Best New Poets, Slate, Boston Review, Ploughshares, FIELD, A Public Space, The Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, Ninth Letter, Court Green, Crab Orchard Review, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Barrow Street, The Normal School, Blackbird, diode, Mid-American Review, Pleiades, Gettysburg Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Originally from Delaware, Pierce earned her B.A. from Susquehanna University, her M.F.A. from the Ohio State University, and her Ph.D. from the University of Missouri. She now lives in Starkville, Mississippi, where she is an associate professor and co-director of the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.
CATHERINE PIERCE
MAJOR WORKS BIOGRAPHY REVIEWS RELATED WEBSITES BIBLIOGRAPHY
Major Works
Poet Catherine Pierce, Photo by Megan Bean, Mississippi State University. Used by permission.
Catherine Pierce – MSU English Department faculty (photo by Megan Bean / Mississippi State University) Used by permission.
The Tornado Is the World (to be published by Saturnalia Books in 2016)
The Girls of Peculiar 2012 (2013 winner of Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters’ Poetry Award)
Famous Last Words 2008 (winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize)
Animals of Habit (Kent State 2004), winner of the Wick Chapbook Competition
Biography of Catherine Pierce
Catherine Pierce, who grew up in Delaware but now lives in Starkville, Mississippi, is a poet who is currently the co-director of the creative writing program at Mississippi State University’s creative writing program. She has taught classes in both creative writing and Twentieth Century American literature at MSU since 2007. She was the recipient of Mississippi State University’s Arts and Sciences Faculty Teaching Award in the Humanities in 2013.
Pierce began her college education at Susquehanna University in 2000 where she received a B.A. In 2003 she obtained a M.F.A. at Ohio State University, and in 2007 she received her Ph.D. from the University of Missouri.
The Tornado is the World, 2016
The Tornado is the World, 2016
Her poetry books include The Girls of Peculiar, which won the 2013 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters’ Poetry Award; Famous Last Words, which was the 2008 winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; and Animals of Habit, a chapbook published by Kent State in 2004 and the winner of the Wick Chapbook Competition. Her fourth collection of poems, The Tornado Is the World, will be published by Saturnalia Books in 2016. The poems in her new book focus on individuals’ responses to a tornado.
Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications that include The Best American Poetry, Slate, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Mississippi Review, and others.
Pierce is married to fiction writer Michael Kardos, and they have two children. They live in Starkville, Mississippi.
Return to Top
Catherine Pierce,
Associate Professor &
Co-Director of Creative Writing
Contact:
2310 Lee Hall
Department of English
P.O. Box E
Mississippi State, MS 39762
cp341@msstate.edu
Catherine Pierce
Professional Bio
Catherine Pierce co-directs MSU's creative writing program, and teaches classes in creative writing and American literature. She is the author of three books of poems: The Tornado Is the World (2016), The Girls of Peculiar (2012), andFamous Last Words (2008, winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize), all from Saturnalia Books. The Girls of Peculiar won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Poetry in 2013. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Slate, Ploughshares, Boston Review, Crab Orchard Review, FIELD, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. She joined the faculty at Mississippi State in 2007.
Education:
Ph.D., University of Missouri, 2007
M.F.A., The Ohio State University, 2003
B.A., Susquehanna University, 2000
Teaching Interests:
Creative Writing, poetry
20th Century American literature
Recent Courses:
Women and Literature
Craft of Poetry
The American Play from 1945 to Present
Publications:
Books
The Tornado is the World
The Tornado Is the World
2016, 80 pp.
ISBN 978-0996220668
Saturnalia
Girls of PeculiarThe Girls of Peculiar
2012, 80 pp.
ISBN 978-0983368625
Saturnalia
Famous Last Words
Famous Last Words
2008, 80 pp.
ISBN 0-97549-907-6
Saturnalia
Animals of Habit
Chapbook
Animals of Habit
Wick Poetry Chapbook Series Three, #7
2004, 40 pp
ISBN 0-87338-805-4
Kent State University Press
Selected Recent Publications
Reprint. “Relevant Details.” The Best American Poetry 2015. Ed. Sherman Alexie. New York: Scribner, 2015.
“Alleys,” “Disaster Work.” Copper Nickel 20 (2015): 7-10.
“The Tornado Knows Itself.” The Normal School 7.2 (2014): 80.
“On the Worst Days of the Fever.” Colorado Review 41.1 (2014): 134-135.
“The Tornado Wants a Companion.” The Cincinnati Review 10.2 (2014): 127.
“Heroines,” “Relevant Details.” Pleiades 34.1 (2014): 165-167.
Professional Honors and Awards
Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Poetry (for The Girls of Peculiar), 2013.
Mississippi State University’s Arts and Sciences Faculty Teaching Award in the Humanities, 2013.
February 06, 2017
Facing Down Danger (and Its Aftermath): A Conversation with Catherine Pierce, Author of The Tornado Is the World [by Susan Elliott Brown]
Catherine Pierce’s widely anticipated third book The Tornado Is the World takes readers on a frightening, perilous, and ultimately enlightening excursion as a deadly tornado threatens to decimate a town and its people. The poems in this collection shine a light on human fear and examine our response to danger and possible destruction, but they also move into surprising and unfamiliar territory by showing us what the titular tornado thinks, feels, and wants. Moving deftly between several characters’ points of view—including the tornado’s—Pierce exposes human truths about what we do when our livelihoods are threatened and how we understand the world around us when it is almost taken away.
Pierce answered my questions about the The Tornado Is the World, letting us in on her writing process, the most challenging aspects of writing this collection, and how she shaped the book.
Susan Elliott Brown: The pervading sensation I had while reading The Tornado Is the World was a feeling of imminent danger, not just of the tornado approaching or tearing through a town, but also of violence lurking at the edges of almost every poem, like the foreshadowed death by drowning of a starlet in “In Which I Am Famous,” or the multiple implied plots and escapes in “Heroines.” How do you see danger as a driving force in this collection? How does it move the collection along its arc?
Catherine Pierce: Danger is this book’s engine, I think—it, or the threat of it, propels everything. There’s a line in the poem “The Tornado Visits the Town” that gets at that driving force—the tornado refers to the way that fear “makes life perfect and sharp /as a shattered plate,” and though the tornado is not the most reliable observer, there’s something to its claim here, this idea of fear as a great crystallizer or catalyst. In terms of arc, there’s a trajectory both in the book’s three sections and also in the middle, more narrative section, which chronicles an EF-4 tornado’s impact on a town—both the book and that section open with looming but ignorable danger, then shift into the actual crisis, and then finally arrive at the strange, glowing aftermath of crisis.
The Tornado Visits the Town
The tornado waits to become itself,
slowly turning above the interstate.
Radio words crackle through the air:
major rotation, place of shelter, but also
that was AC/DC with and
so I said Lady, you can keep the ring! and
folks, a donation today will—
This, the tornado sees, is a town
in need. Bankrupt of the fear
that makes life perfect and sharp
as a shattered plate.
So the tornado gathers itself.
Below, a few faces blanch in windows.
Some cars speed up. Some cars slow down.
The tornado dips and loudens,
rises, then dips again.
The tornado is gratified
to see a man cowering in a ditch,
a small girl racing from backyard to house.
Everyone is learning. The radios
are silenced. Then other noises
filter up into the turbulence.
A horse pawing at its stall floor.
A woman yelling In here, Kayla, now!
A litany of apologies: God, I’m sorry
for last New Year’s,
for refusing to visit my mother,
for calling the hunchback “the hunchback,”
for the accident, the spelling test, the six hundred dollars.
A man whispering Spare me, oh God, I’ll make it right.
But the tornado cannot stop. Will not.
The world cannot stop turning, and this minute
the tornado is the world. Cars lift like birds,
trees bullet, everything is collapse.
The tornado has no regrets.
Has no regrets.
Has no regrets.
SEB: You’re able to inhabit the headspace of multiple characters and voices in this collection, from the “Unabashed Tourist” to a protective mother, from a frightened teenager to the tornado itself. How were you able to give voices to all of these different things? What was the biggest challenge of writing about the feelings of the tornado?
CP: The biggest challenge of writing from the point of view of the tornado was trying to maintain some degree of empathy for it. The tornado is the villain of the book, but villains don’t usually see themselves as villains, of course, so I tried to imagine how a tornado might justify its destruction to itself. That was tough at times. In terms of giving voice to all the different characters—some of them, like the mother, or the teenager, are or have been me, at least to some degree, so those didn’t require much in the way of transmutation; for the others I was working under the same principle I followed in writing the tornado—trying to embody them, even the less obviously sympathetic ones, with empathy.
SEB: Motionpoems made a stunning short film of “The Mother Warns the Tornado.” What was it like for you to see this poem made into a different form? Why do you think this particular poem works so well as a film?
CP: It was really staggering and moving for me to see the film—to witness how someone else took such care with these words, and was able to make this new art out what I’d written. I think the intensity of the poem, its inherent drama—it’s about a mother sheltering her son and warning off the encroaching tornado—probably helped to make it particularly suited to the medium, but beyond that, I’m not sure. I do know that the director, Isaac Ravishankara, made a film that’s tremendously active and alive, and I’m grateful for it.
SEB: While part II of the collection hones in on the tornado’s arrival, destruction, and immediate aftermath, part III pulls back the lens and examines the world after the tornado. The speakers of these poems bring a heightened sense of understanding to the objects and scenarios they encounter. What do you think remains at stake for these speakers, even after the tornado has passed?
CP: It’s that “heightened sense of understanding,” I think, that ups the stakes for the speakers in the last third of the book—now that the precariousness of life has been made palpable, quantifiable, all its mundane trappings have become more vibrant and remarkable. But it’s hard, if not impossible, to sustain that wonder all the time, and those later poems are also reckoning with that.
An Apologia for Taking Things for Granted
When the finite dimensions of being alive
light up suddenly as they do from time to time—
when the famous movie critic dies, when
the office across the hall is one day humming
with gossip and florescence, the next day dark—
I resolve again to see everything
in Technicolor, to hold each click of a switch,
each pollen-thick day in my hands and know
its true weight. And for an hour, an evening,
I do. The earth trills and glows. The buzz
of the neighbor’s hedge clippers a rich contralto,
the red of the tomato on the counter shocking luck—
how is it that I get to see something that red,
and eat it, too? But soon the walls—speckled
with flung bananas from my son’s breakfast,
scratched by the gone dog I loved—begin
to swell with their own miracles and my heart
begins its galloping, terrified and nearly detonating
with gratitude it can’t contain. The afternoon
is suddenly too gold, too mote-misted
to comprehend. My husband’s question of spinach
or broccoli with dinner is a yawning crevasse
into which I fall headlong—the possibility of choices,
the greens of the vegetables, the crunch, the wonder
of appetite. Yes, I forget my expiring license,
my clicking jaw, but I forget, too, the pleasure
of a meal that is only and entirely a meal.
The insects and lizards and navy blue sky and moon
like a caricature of itself gang up and close in
until everything is blurred and muted, the street
a rinsed canvas, only my blood thudding in my ears.
Of course I wish I could properly worship
the nectarine. Of course I wish I could
give central heating its due. But I’ve learned
my lesson. If I can keep on half-hearing
crickets, at least I can keep on hearing them.
SEB: In “The Tornado Knows Itself,” as well as other poems about the tornado, I viewed the shape of the poem as reflective of the shape of the tornado itself—like a strong, sturdy column. How did the subjects and themes in this collection determine the forms and shapes of the poems?
CP: Oh, I’m glad you noticed that! Generally speaking, I like a fairly uniform line length in my poems. This isn’t for any real reason other than that I find it aesthetically pleasing, and it tends to be how my mind operates as I consider lineation. But in the lineation of this book, in particular in the middle section that chronicles the tornado’s impact, I gave myself permission to be freer and more reckless with my line breaks, and tried to stay attuned to gut-level instincts governed by the voices of each speaker. In writing the tornado poems, for example, I broke the lines sometimes at intentionally odd or jarring places, and tried to keep the line lengths uneven in poems that had to do with the tornado’s instability or the town’s devastation. In the poem you mention, yes, I did want that sturdy, columnar shape there, as this poem is the tornado laying claim to itself, asserting its primacy.
SEB: How was your writing process different for this collection than for your previous collections?
CP: For one thing, this one was more personal. My family and I did have a very close call with a tornado, and I was working in this book to translate the terror of that experience to the page. And yet this book also draws more on persona and narrative invention than my other books, so there’s a balance there. I also wrote and scrapped more for this book than I ever have before—I worked a long time on getting the tone, the characterizations, the movement from one section to the next right, and so a lot of poems I thought I’d include didn’t end up making it through the final cut. There are entire characters—an old man, a young couple, the town’s dentist—that had their own poems and story arcs but got scrapped. Finally, more than in the construction of my other books, I approached the editing and shaping of this one with half of me firm on the solid terrain of logistics (what needs to happen when in this narrative arc? how was this character impacted by that thing? is it time for this image to come back?) and the other half floating in the zero gravity of instinct (what feels right? what emotional beat is needed here?).
Catherine Pierce's most recent book of poems is The Tornado Is the World (Saturnalia 2016); she is also the author of The Girls of Peculiar (2012) and Famous Last Words (2008). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, Boston Review, FIELD, and elsewhere. She co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.
Posted By Zachary Wohl on Mar 30, 2017
On March 23, the English department held a night of Poetry-in-the-Round where poet Catherine Pierce came to share some of her poems. Pierce, a professor at Mississippi State, has written three collections of poems to date. In these collections, Pierce constructs a narrative that focuses on major themes.
“Each of my books has had some sort of thematic thread, some more explicitly than others,” Pierce said.
Joey Khan/Photography and Digital Editor
The main book that she read from, The Tornado Is the World, centers on an EF-4 tornado and the effects it has on a midwest town.
“These themes are personal to me in some way—I don’t think I could write about something in which I didn’t have a personal stake,” Pierce said.
During the event, Pierce explained her life in the midwest and how being a mother has shifted her focus and helped shape some of her poems. After publishing her first book of poetry in 2004, Pierce still has a strong drive to write.
“I’m drawn to the craft element of making poems, the actual building process, the maddening and satisfying puzzle of trying to shape language into meaning,” Pierce said. In addition to writing new poetry, Pierce also serves as a co-director of the creative writing program at Mississippi State.
Students in attendance explained their appreciation for the author’s style.
Catherine Pierce shared advice and her poetry at Poetry-in-the-Round. Joey Khan/Photography and Digital Editor.
Melanie Weir, a junior creative writing and theater double -major, enjoyed Pierce’s writing so much that she purchased one of her books.
“I really liked how she took such big, complex ideas and wrote about them in an elegant manner,” Weir said. “I usually don’t find poetry as interesting as I did [at this event]. These poems did not need a lot of explaining and that made them easily accessible.”
Annie Madden, a junior visual and sound media and creative writing double-major, had a personal appreciation for Pierce’s work.
“I am from the midwest, and I’ve been through a couple tornadoes. It was interesting to see a tornado handled in such an elegant way,” Madden said.
In addition to sharing her work with aspiring writers, Pierce also gave some advice to potential writers.
“My No.1 advice is to read. There’s just no way to be the best writer you can be if you’re not actively reading the work of other writers, seeing what’s out there [and] studying that craft,” she explained.
Zachary Wohl can be reached at zachary.wohl@student.shu.edu.
The Tornado Is the World
Publishers Weekly.
263.47 (Nov. 21, 2016): p88.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Tornado Is the World
Catherine Pierce. Saturnalia (UPNE, dist.), $16 trade paper (76p) ISBN 978-0-9962206-6-8
In her third collection, Pierce (The Girls of Peculiar) confronts various forms of fear and anxiety that can
intrude on one's seemingly placid and satisfied, yet "absurdly flimsy life." The collection blossomed from an
event that Pierce records in the penultimate poem, in which she writes, "once, in a Days Inn bathroom in
Cullman, Alabama,/I covered my four-month-old son as my husband/covered me as the tornado went by."
It's the type of life-altering scenario that can both cause a person to feel newly thankful for what they have
and to see danger everywhere. In this light and with delightful imagination, Pierce explores diverging
memories as well as a series of imaginary vacation scenarios experienced by a protagonist called "the
unabashed tourist." In "An Apologia for Taking Things for Granted," she confesses, "I resolve to see
everything/ in Technicolor, to hold each click of a switch,/ each pollen-thick day in my hands and know/its
true weight." However, the stamina and focus needed to sustain this sense of wonder can be paralyzing,
which is perhaps why Pierce continually returns to the terrifying experience at the Days Inn. Pierce's
tornado, with its hunger and unsettlingly human compassion, will make readers feel like a mother stepping
out in its wake--into a "new, world-strewn world." (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Tornado Is the World." Publishers Weekly, 21 Nov. 2016, p. 88. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471273945&it=r&asid=0999dfe220dd64b2a69e13f12c5f3256.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471273945