“Literacy is a sensitivity to pattern. As a means of survival, we cultivate an awareness of signs and systems, learning to look back to anticipate a future. In Surveille, Caitlin Roach is a reader of omens, of the shapes hidden in shadows, recasting the hard lessons of the natural world. Born between the twin flames of Brigit Pegeen Kelly and Mary Oliver, this book is both intimate and political. A bridge between the public chaos surrounding us and the portentous silence of private life, these poems are urgent and heart-piercing. This debut challenges us to stand witness.”
—Amaud Jamaul Johnson, author of Imperial Liquor
“In Surveille, Caitlin Roach not only “queer[s] the cruelness of the world,” but also its fruiting lushness, while pinning her reader as bull’s-eye at its center. In these poems, bucks circle does, poisoned water teems with beaked fish, drones hover, and amidst the ferocious glint of this marred earth, desire sings. Stunning!”
—Nomi Stone, author of Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire and Kill Class
“Surveille brought me down to my knees in utter awe and ache. Caitlin Roach’s striking debut collection of poems reckons with the violent intersections of the personal and political body on the brink of birth. Roach’s poetry is exacting and lush, unspooling with striking imagery as she examines the ways we watch and are watched. These brilliant poems braid and ricochet off the pastoral and deeply psychological landscapes with probing depth and exquisite diction. Each line was a whole poem to me. Each line seduced me. Each line wrecked me with surprise and a sense of implication, confronting the terrors of the world and the ailments of the body as the speaker in these poems surveys the American borders of the public and private consciousness with remarkable force and execution.”
—Tiana Clark, author of I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood
“Caitlin Roach’s fabulous debut collection, Surveille, investigates the intersections of local and global violence on the global and local body. In poems both lyrical and narrative, personal and political, Roach asks important questions about what it means to be safe in this world at this moment in history, despite (or because of) the many modes of surveillance at our disposal. Roach’s deep concern and compassion ranges from those targeted by unmanned drones, to threats to the natural world, to the victims of gun violence, to the well-being of friends and family, to the physical and psychological health of her children about to enter our fraught world. As I read through these wise and painful and beautiful poems, I was made aware of just how increasingly vulnerable we all are. But I was reassured by the fact that there are voices out there like Caitlin Roach’s that make being in this body and in this country not just bearable but joyful. This book is a triumph.”
—Dean Rader, author of Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly