Side Show: Poems

Catherine French was born and raised in the Central Valley of California and currently resides in Sacramento. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, The Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, and numerous other literary journals across the United States. An earlier version of Side Show was awarded the James D. Phelan Award from the San Francisco Foundation for best manuscript in progress.

"These are aware poems, like those creatures who stay awake all night while others sleep. Their syntax is alert, limber and full of delicious surprises such as, 'a bathtub/for the horse's water,/algae on the bottom/like the fur of a struck piano key.' Most of all it is the way these poems see beneath the surface - beneath the temporary, the permanent, beneath the ordinary, the magical, inhabited by 'fortunetelling fish,' that makes this first collection so seductive." - Beckian Fritz Goldberg, author of Never Be the Horse "If Cavafy had suffered some intervention of fate and been not Greek but American, then Side Show could have been his most brilliant volume of verse. These poems stand, and turn, and stand again making the motion of poetic though credible, almost familiar, but stunning." - Norman Dubie, author of The Mercy Seat