Cati Porter (Poetry) | Riverside, CA

Cati Porter is a poet, editor, and community arts facilitator. She is founder and editor of literary journals Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry and Inlandia: A Literary Journey, and the author of My Skies of Small Horses (WordTech, 2016) Seven Floors Up (Mayapple Press, 2008), the chapbooks small fruit songs (Pudding House,2008), (al)most delicious (dancing girl press, 2010), The Way Things Move The Dark (dancing girl press, 2013), what Desire makes of us (e-chapbook with Ahadada Books, 2011; in print from dancinggirl press, 2015) with illustrations by her sister Amy Payne, and The Body, Like Bread (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Her third full-length collection, The Body at a Loss, is forthcoming in 2019 from CavanKerry Press. She lives with her family in California’s Inland Empire, where she is the Executive Director of the Inlandia Institute, a regionally-focused literary nonprofit.tive Director of the Inlandia Institute, a regionally-focused literary nonprofit.

Books

Chapbooks

• The Body, Like Bread  (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Poetry.
• what Desire makes of us  (dancing girl press, 2016). Poetry.
• The Way Things Move The Dark  (dancing girl press, 2013). Poetry.
• (al)most delicious  (dancing girl press, 2010). Poetry.
• Small Fruit Songs  (Pudding House, 2008). Poetry.

Blurbs, Press & Reviews

Cati Porter’s My Skies of Small Horses revels in a domestic space that twists and morphs until a dystopic world is revealed. The speaker persists through various trials with a feral power that wreaks havoc on the ordinary. With language that is both daring and dazzling, she lets her survivalist mode kick in and lays claim to this tumultuous realm where, “beneath the table, beneath the chairs,/small horses take shelter:// I cross the field./I clap my hands./I want to see them run.” A brilliant and vital collection!
—Molly Bendall, author of Under the Quick and Ariadne’s Island

Cati Porter knows that the domestic sphere is a space full of knives, that a human is a zoo animal, and that a lover is someone who holds your hair while you vomit. With plenty o’ nods to Plath and looking-glass Alice, the language in My Skies of Small Horses is like a steep spiral staircase with a velvet bannister, tricky and lush and twisting. It’s a poetry of the “haunted, the unhung and moonsung, the run and the con.”
— Arielle Greenberg, author of Slice and My Kafka Century and co-editor of Gurlesque: the new grrly, burlesque, grotesque poetics

Cati Porter’s The Body, Like Bread is a marriage of Epicureanism and Eroticism, a dance between renunciation and desire. One of her poems boldly proclaims, “Every Poem Is Not a Love Poem,” but that isn’t true of this collection. Every single poem in this collection explores desire, “the web-nest at the stem, the marble of it, glistening.”
—Shaindel Beers, author of A Brief History of Time and The Children’s War and Other Poems

These are aching poems, mouth-watering poems, thrumming with every hunger the body can hold. These poems hold the meat and fruit and bread you would find in a fever dream—sensual and satisfying and strange. With The Body, Like Bread, Cati Porter has delivered a breathtaking feast.
—Gayle Brandeis, author of Delta Girls, Self Storage, The Book of Dead Birds, and Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write

“(al)most delicious is like the thoughts of a figure in a painting. But more than that it is a kaleidoscopic meditation on the theme of artist and model. Or like a room of mirrors in which looking and being seen are erotic, and creator, creation and observer are locked in a love triangle of reflection and illusion. Enter, listen to the voices and the music, you will be rewarded.”
—Richard Garcia

“Like bees extracting pollen, Cati Porter has found the rich and mysterious nourishment of the things in front of us, the poetry in plain view. In deceptively simple language, she startles us into insights. We’re presented with a delightfully off-kilter world where a woman weds a tree while “the wind administers vows,” where another woman, “large with grief and belly full of bees,” would like to scream but finds “her mouth has become a honeycomb, her teeth and tongue coated in golden duress.” Small fruit songs is nothing short of delicious.”
—Beth Ann Fennelly

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