In the photographs in 'Home and Other Stories, ' Catherine Wagner takes these precepts as her starting point. Each three-part work shows various aspects of one American home: rooms or potions of rooms and objects in ensembles that are carefully arranged for visitors or carelessly disposed in privacy.

Home and Other Stories

Arts & Photography

Wagner, Catherine

Conkelton, Sheryl

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Photography & Video

Univ of New Mexico Pr

Home and Other Stories: Photographs by Catherine Wagner

How to Make Candy

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Desserts

Putnam Pub. Group

In Nervous Device, Catherine Wagner takes inspiration from William Blake's "bounding line" to explore the poem as a body at the intersection between poet and audience. Using this as a figure for sexual, political and economic interactions, Wagner's poems shift between seductive lyricism and brash fragmentation as they negotiate the failure of human connection in the twilight of American empire. Intellectually informed, yet insistent on their objecthood, Wagner's poems express a self-conscious skepticism even as they maintain an optimistically charged eroticism.
"Wagner's fourth collection contains poems of memory and dark artifice. She writes with an obscure, magnetic lens. . . . Wagner contrasts these complicated poems with short, clean, pieces that offer a kind of breathing space for the reader. Not to be mistaken for trivial, the linguistic tightness of these poems are highlights of Wagner’s collection."—Publishers Weekly
"Taking with one hand what they give with the other, Wagner's poems are full of vehemence and disdain and tenderness and somewhere, in some inexpugnable part of the body of language through which so many discomforting feelings pass, a thorny kind of joy. This is my idea of great poetry: in which 'The actual is / flickering a binary / between word and not-word.'"—Barry Schwabsky, Hyperallergic
"Nervous Device is such a smart book. You never know where the poems are going to take you, or when some startling, often cringe-making image or thought will intrude. Unable to settle into a comfortable rhetorical space, these poems reject simple claims to knowing something or doing right or changing the world. Rather, they move like an erratic insect stuck in a language bell jar. Brilliant, and disturbing."—Jennifer Moxley
"Nervous Device, the human machine, palpitating inside its own little bounding lines. These poems do everything the human device does, vibrating like an electrified tornado inside a glass jar, and make this reader profoundly alive to huge swathes of being. There is no machine for mastering the self (yet), but there are Cathy Wagner's poems."—Eleni Sikelianos
"The poems in Nervous Device resonate with a knowing nod to time and the difficulty and struggle of being sentient and intimate—of loving while being human. This is poetry connectivty: sexy, poignant, knowing. And the poems here make me feel possible."—Hoa Nguyen
"Wagner's poems contain multitudes, at once overflowing with seductive lyricism only to suddenly shift into brash fragmentation. She is informed, but the word subjective has no place whatsoever in her work. As the cover suggests, the potential for human connection is downright erotic for Wagner."Alexis Coe, SF Weekly
"The notion that the audience is 'putting [their] finger in [her] vagina' while reading Nervous Device signals one of Wagner's primary thematic concerns in the collection: the complex relationship between poetry, sex, desire, and the body."—Joshua Ware
"Wagner is to be lauded, first and foremost, for her daring, her conceptual eclecticism, and her linguistic range. . . . Nervous Device is a clear-eyed and brave testament to the changing currents of a poet's life."—Seth Abramson, The Huffington Post
" . . . the manner in which Wagner structures the language through repetitive dialogue both builds meaning and breaks it apart. . . . Wagner balances disjunction and lucidity, private and public, distant and (riskily) up-close."—Jessica Comola, HTML Giant

Nervous Device: City Lights Spotlight Series No. 8 (City Lights Spotlight, 8)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

City Lights Publishers

Shows elementary, high school, and college classrooms, labs, kitchens, language labs, and lecture halls

American Classroom: The Photographs of Catherine Wagner

Tucker, Anne Wilkes

Museum of Fine Arts. Houston

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Images of classrooms as interiors, of all grade levels. Exhibition catalogue. Photographs by Catherine Wagner; curated with an essay by Anne Wilkes Tucker; essay by Willie Morris. 83 pages; 42 full-page b&w plates plus 3 text illustrations; 11.75 x 10 inches. Exhibition checklist, biography, bibliography, exhibitions history.

Aperture

Poetry. "There is a troubled and mischievous soul running through the corridors of HOTEL FAUST. It is a soul determined not to be lost. Listen as it grabs and rattles its raw ambivalent sexuality, its solid yet mercurial American identity, its given taken and shaken language. Wagner's poems are poltergeists intruding in the vulnerable reality of the humdrum loony world. They disturb, fascinate and physically move" - Geraldine Monk. "I pick and pick the seam all day/ does I really think anything covers me up/ this my swan is it/ eyes at one end cunt at the other/ a swaying hurting wonder between/ which is posture perfect" - from "CafT Rouge."

Hotel Faust

Gratton Street Irregulars

"The poems of Catherine Wagner are instantly sacramental, immediately mysterious. Showing songlines to Spicer's profanity and to Zukofsky's purest register, they move through musics entirely their own. There, MISS AMERICA finds a world wide-open but unharmed. There, Wagner proves the wisdom of divided hearts. She is a mage and a marvel. I believe she is our best."--Donald Russell

Miss America

Literary

Fence Books

Catherine Wagner's poems proclaim a finitude that is anything but final, that is instead embodied and generative. That Wagner is in love with the world and its transactions--perceptions, superficial and otherwise; childbearing, painful and otherwise; gains, financial and otherwise--allows for a poetry that is full of song yet brazenly topical.

Macular Hole

Every year, millions of students pay enormous sums for a college education. Most have no idea how easily a single false accusation can derail their dreams. Shocked, shamed, and silenced, they watch their futures crumble in the campus kangaroo courts of "academic integrity."Catherine Wagner was an enthusiastic, top-performing student when she unwittingly walked into a trap. After she gave a classmate authorized aid on one part of one homework question, a grader flagged their answers as "similar," and both were accused of cheating. Innocent, Catherine was certain that she would be exonerated. Yet, despite the support of eight PhD experts from across the U.S., she was dragged through her university's academic integrity machine on absurd "evidence" of similarities-even the simple use of "H2O" to abbreviate water.Forced to defend her reputation and career prospects against the threat of expulsion, Catherine discovered that the University seemed to repeatedly break federal law, spy on her, and reject science in favor of fallacies and falsehoods. Using concepts from statistics and behavioral science to scrutinize audio recordings and university emails, Catherine systematically unmasked the unthinkable: a confidence scheme fueling clandestine research on more than 2,000 students for over a decade.

Easy Marks: Cracking a University's Academic Integrity Con

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

Sunlight Works

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