In our hyper-real, post-truth world, many poems feel like copies. Reading them feels like watching a sunset on television. How striking and fresh it is – a small miracle, really – to now and then come across the genuine article. These poems by Cati Porter pay loving attention to things that matter: a baby possum's hardscrabble life, a teenager's midnight ambulance ride, gun laws, the tumult of adolescence, and the anxieties of parenthood. Not a line feels false, forced, half-baked, or overcooked. This book is "an ancient radio / tuned to another / dimension…a portal" that leads us out of the quotidian humdrum, into the realm of pure song.

--Tom C. Hunley, author of "What Feels Like Love: New and Selected Poems"

In small mammals, Cati Porter explores the complexities of being a mother with sons who sometimes sit "in [the] gut…first a grain of sand, layering up". These often wry, witty, and haunting snapshots of the small moments of love and anguish illustrate fully the ways the rebellion of teenagehood is a universal truth we should not hide. At the end of the book we learn of the death of one of these boys and this knowledge coupled with the lyrical mastery of voice is simply devastating. This book is a tour de force, one of utter truth and bravery.

--Nikia Chaney, author of "To Stir &"

"Miracle enough was that I saw" reads the first line of small mammals, a line that speaks to the whole collection: it's truly miracle enough that Cati Porter sees. It's an even greater miracle that she documents what she sees through her poetry, and, in doing so, lets us see the world afresh. Her poems help us track the baffling passage of time, help us remember mothering is not for the fainthearted, help us praise dirty socks on the bathroom floor, help us see how eating from our favorite plate, with our favorite fork, can be a joyful act of empowerment. This collection thrums with pain and loss, with the acknowledgment that "Fruit rots. Wood decays. Rope frays. Bodies burn," yet it also vibrates with love and hope, with the beautiful reminder that "The womb of the heart has room to spare." A clear-eyed, keen-eared miracle of a book.

--Gayle Brandeis, author of "Many Restless Concerns"

John Brantingham in Cultural Daily

Cati Porter’s Small Mammals is an exploration of a number of things, but primarily what it means to be the mother of teenage boys. It is both what one might expect and not expect at the same time. Of course, there is the chaos of the teenage years, but there are also many scenes of surprising tenderness and love from her boys. There are moments of violence, and of compassion, and a discussion of what friendship means.

Stephanie Barbé Hammer in The Journal of Radical Wonder

Cati Porter’s new collection of poems, Small Mammals, promises a close-up encounter with the mammals in her life, beginning with the unexpected sight of a baby mole struggling to navigate the asphalt. What is a mole doing on the road? The poet doesn’t answer; instead she studies this small creature, before surrendering to the desire to protect it. ... A subtly spectacular achievement, Small Mammals is a collection that gives voice to loss, love, memory, and affirms the ethical force of the maternal, as well as the poetic determination to make loss matter.

Penelope Moffett in Your Daily Voice

The poems of small mammals are so well-crafted the craft is nearly invisible; while highly polished, they have not been polished to death. The voice is grounded in the everyday world, serious but also often imbued with a humor that sneaks up on you, the way the speaker acknowledges her own absurdity in trying to usher a mole from the hazards of a road into bushes just beyond the curb. ... The poems of small mammals are votives illuminating a life strongly intertwined with other lives.

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