Alumna Catherine Pond '13 To Publish 'Fieldglass' with SIU Press

Fieldglass, a debut poetry collection by alumna Catherine Pond '13, will be released this Friday by Southern Illinois University Press. The book is available for pre-order here. 

The collection follows the speaker's journey from childhood to adulthood as she develops her sexual identity and learns to navigate complex family as well as friendship dynamics. Throughout this queer coming-of-age, the speaker's emotional journey is mirrored by physical experiences of transit—drives, train rides, long flights—and as her path unfolds, she unravels feelings of "displacement, trauma, and separateness."

The collection has received praise from Columbia faculty including Professor Timothy Donnelly, who called the book, "At once Greek in its fatalism and, increasingly, all-American in its faith in self-determination, Fieldglass speculates its way through clouds of complex family dynamics, sexual trauma, and extreme agape in order to be beaten in the end into a depth of self-knowledge that is sister to wisdom and predawn of strength. ‘Nothing ever really breaks,’ Pond writes, ‘though force can cause a flexible object to deform.’ One of the many gifts of this brilliant collection is to remind us that deformation like this produces not necessarily a compromise to identity but, often, the fullest realization of it.”

Fieldglass was also named the winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, judged by Traci Brimhall. This recognition awarded Pond a $1,500 honorarium to read work from the collection at Southern Illinois University Carbondale upon the book's publication. 

In a recent interview with Ex/Post, Pond shared that "Fieldglass was the project that propelled me for the better part of a decade. It was 'the flower / holding a world in focus,' to borrow a line from Yusef Komunyakaa. The oldest poem in the collection was one I wrote in a workshop in undergrad, but...I cut it from the manuscript during a pre-production purge. So now the oldest poem is probably from 2011, when I started my MFA. I was twenty-one when I moved to Brooklyn to begin grad school, and I graduated when I was twenty-three. At that age it was easy to convince myself that poetry was the only thing that mattered, that I would die for it. I felt that a lot at times. The first iteration of my forthcoming book was my MFA thesis, which I submitted in 2013, also titled Fieldglass."

Catherine Pond is a cofounder, with Julia Anna Morrison, of the online literary magazine Two Peach. For four years, she was the assistant director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and Salmagundi, among others. Currently, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California.