Michael Catherwood • DARE

From the Critics:

It’s been awhile since I’ve read a collection of poems as authentic, disciplined, well-crafted and moving as Mike Catherwood’s new book DARE. Like a good hunting knife, the steel in these poems performs its operations with refinement and a necessary brutality, lifting the skin from everything Catherwood lays hands on.
   • Erin Belieu
     Author of Infanta; National Book Critics' Circle Ten Best of 1995

About the Author:

Michael Catherwood worked as a warehouseman, garbage man, janitor, weed-whacker and truck driver; attending night classes until he received his M.F.A. from the University of Arkansas. His literary work has won the Holt Prize in Poetry and has appeared in numerous journals including AGNI and Borderlands. Catherwood currently teaches at Creighton University.

From Michael Catherwood's DARE

Myers Rum Train, 1993

Into the Blue Mountains the train swayed hours
with the free rum we drank, and me, forgetting the fight
about something profound the night before
instead admired the young black girls
in small towns waiting for the school train,
their pressed white blouses placed like daisies
against the cracked thirsty boards of train stations.

At one stop from a circle of faces
one small schoolgirl elbowed close enough
next to my window to shove her hand in,
to hand me her phone number and address—
not an approach but a quiet plea
from the poverty rum forgets.
                                        I felt rich
and evil moving up into the landscape
and wondered about the minutes and hours
of her life, guessed she understood romance
and adventure, while the Myers Rum blurred
my eyes through the announcements of towns.