“Joy Katz is the quintessential storyteller, spinning her marvelous tales out of the gossamer of the imagination, but always with the goal of capturing the flash and flicker of the real world. In her fine nets, she defamiliarizes the history we thought we knew and weaves her own voice, brilliant, mocking, passionate, clear as a bell, into the muffled sighs of a history that’s been hidden from us. But the pleasure of reading Fabulae comes also from the way the elements of narrative, from the simple to the fabulous, are compressed into beautifully crafted poems. There’s no background hum in this wonderful book—no skimming allowed. Katz combines the art of the fabulator with the art of the sculptor. Hers is a distinctive and original voice.”—Maura Stanton, author of Glacier Wine

“The coordinates for the landscape so beautifully staked out in Joy Katz’s Fabulae are language and desire, the dangerous and the fear that we might ‘like it like heaven . . . and be lost.’ In poems shot through with grace, intellect, and control, Katz considers the history and culture we all stand, finally, as heirs to: from Dachau to the deceptively still surfaces of American suburbia, from Proserpina to Plath, from the subjugation of women to the lust for empire—the result is a collection as rich as it is ambitious, announcing an already accomplished new voice in poetry.”—Carl Phillips, author of Pastoral