All You Do Is Perceive
Joy Katz, Four Way Books
Poetry, 84 pages, $15.95
by Mike Schneider
“I love you so much I think I’m going to be annihilated; have you tried the brownies?” Joy Katz isn’t kidding when she says this — as a one-sentence summation of her third book of poems, All You Do Is Perceive. Well, she’s sort of kidding — about the brownies. But also isn’t — not about the I love you.
Her poetry’s like that. A world perceived vividly through almost constant anxiety of being a mother alone with a small child, day after day. Negotiating crisis, on the edge of bailing out any moment, such as in “Mother’s Love,” the book’s core poem: “Give the child up, says the warm blanket/ . . . you are my favorite, says falling out a window”
The offer of brownies — back to that one-sentence synopsis — is like how Katz often flashes sly humor, near to black sometimes, but smiling, and meaning it, in the midst of life-and-death seriousness. “Happiness is on me like a scratch in a car door,” she says.
Katz lives in Point Breeze, with her husband and six-year-old son, born in Vietnam, whom she adopted when he was two-months-old and nurtured while living in Brooklyn for his early years. That densely urban environment suffuses the book.
She teaches in the graduate writing program at Chatham and in Carlow’s Mad-Women-in-the-Attic workshops. After first coming to Pittsburgh about 15 years ago to start a career in industrial design, Katz became interested in poetry and, following her instinct to write, headed to Stanford on a Stegner Fellowship. Pittsburgh is graced to have her again among us.
She fashions an attractively strange, layered, distinctive voice, as in “Suicide Cascade”: “The saddest time in my life was also the time the most people said, You look beautiful . . . also the time I wrote about furniture, the heavier the better . . . The poet tried to reach her therapist before she killed herself/ is a place you can change the ending.”
The work is both deeply personal and aware of socio-political history. “They’re sending postcards from the hanging” is the unspoken Dylan line that leads to Katz’s poem “A Lynched Man Came with the Mail onto my Desk.” Her “The Very Last Movie about the Nazis” reflects her sensitivity to the difficult ambivalence — “I turned the Holocaust into a pet” — involved in writing about these horrors that are, inescapably, embedded in culture.
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