ABOUT THIS BOOK

“Poems that stick with you like a song that won’t stop repeating itself in your brain, poems whose cadences burrow into your bloodstream, orchestrating your breathing long before their sense attaches its hooks to your heart.”
—Washington Post on Captivity

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Toi Derricotte is the author of four previous poetry collections: The Empress of the Death House; Natural Birth; Captivity; and Tender, winner of the Patterson Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors. Derricotte is cofounder of Cave Canem and professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

REVIEWS

“Poems that stick with you like a song that won’t stop repeating itself in your brain, poems whose cadences burrow into your bloodstream, orchestrating your breathing long before their sense attaches its hooks to your heart.”
—Washington Post on Captivity

“Toi Derricotte’s poems show us our underlife, tender and dreadful. And they are vibrant poems, poems in the voice of the living creature, the one who escaped—and paused, and turned back, and saw, and cried out. This is one of the most beautiful and necessary voices in American poetry today.”
—Sharon Olds on Captivity

“Derricotte’s words touch the reader as life has touched her, soul and body. This is a strong, sensuous, original, courageous book.”
—Adrienne Rich on Captivity

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Part I. The Undertaker’s Daughter

I am not afraid to be memoir

Burial sites

The undertaker’s daughter

Sunday afternoons at Claire Carlyle’s

For my unnamed brother (1943–1943)

Dolls

Part II. A Memory of the Future

I see my father after his death

My dad & sardines

On a picture of the Buddhist monk Pema Chödrön

On the revolution of the Jersey cows

The new pet

The Telly Cycle

For Telly the fish

Special ears

Another poem of a small grieving for my fish Telly

On the reasons I loved Telly the fish

Because I was good to Telly in his life,

An apology to Telly the revolutionary

When the goddess makes love to me,

Untitled

The night I stopped singing like Billie Holiday

When I touched her

The iris and chicken fat

Lighting the tulips

Gershwin

A little prayer to Our Lady

To a cruel lover

Cherry blossoms

How Craig Foster enabled me to write the poems I’m writing now & gave me this voice

Part III. The Undertaking

The exigencies of form

The undertaking

Acknowledgments

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