In Cati Porter’s fourth collection of poetry, small mammals, maternal love is extended to an assemblage of creatures big and small, with a focus on those most misunderstood of mammals, the human teenager. Everyday encounters become sublime: a conversation with a Rite Aid drugstore clerk, watching a documentary about ants with her son, a Sunday drive to look for wild burros. With equal parts curiosity and concern, small mammals takes an up close and personal look at the complexities of mothering teenage boys. It is the “What to Expect…” book you didn’t know you needed, bearing witness to what it means to be tender, vulnerable, and alive.
small mammals
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"
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