Fabulae : Poems by Joy Katz

In Fabulae, Joy Katz interrogates the physical world, turning it over and over in her mind, constructing a sensual and striking autobiography. Her poems find flaws in how we live in the world and suffer from desire but still come back to find delight in it - the language, the objects, and the physical body. She delves into the familiarity and strangeness of the body - its surfaces compared with the inner workings. She questions the many received images / notions about rulers and shapers of the universe, both generally and for the artist. She is relentlessly aware of the failure of words to communicate and preserve experience yet rejoices in the palpable beauty of words, even the letterforms that make them up. For Katz, a subject can be awful and immoral but not without its pleasure, too.