"It was breeding season, / wasn't it, and they were running from something," writes Caitlin Roach. Surveille's queer speaker is on the cusp of motherhood, vacillating between attentiveness and paranoia, surveilling her body, civic bodies, natural and political landscapes, and the child she longs to bring into-and ultimately protect from-this hostile world. Exploring drone strikes, scorpion eradication, bird behavior, mating deer, ICE detainees, and family relationships, Roach's poems stare into and through the truth with a blazing intensity. She writes, "Still, I watch / the watcher watch me watch / the man standing in front of me / peering through the crosshatch / iron mesh, waiting for bodies / beloved he knows he cannot touch / to arrive on the other side." Surveille is a book about people under various forms of control (self-inflicted and external), about watching and being watched (by oneself, by others, by the state), about mothering, and about the desperate search for meaning in a world that feels increasingly violent and filled with despair. Hold the husk. Suck each bead out. There are degrees of loss, speeds at which pain travels through the body. See, even the rose neck's bent. I do not need to tell you I'm sick. I want to be remembered for the absence my body made in space. -Excerpt from "Gardening, the mother gives her daughter a lesson on loss"
Caitlin Roach is a queer poet from Southern California. Her poems have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Tin House, jubilat, The Iowa Review, Poetry Daily, Colorado Review, and Best New Poets (2023, 2021, and 2017), among other publications. She earned an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is a three-time National Poetry Series finalist. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and their two sons.
[one] The Rut The Inheritance of Intelligence Doe after Lightning Storm Heirloom Hunter, Snow Goose, Shadow Gardening, the Mother Gives Her Daughter a Lesson on Loss At the Window Plea Witness Statement [two] Heronry Nine Days after the Drowning On Christmas Eve Out of Bounds Host Derivations In the Conservatory In Oakland Cemetery [three] Principles of Design [Las Vegas, Nevada] Cancer, by Definition, Is an Abnormal Cell Growing Out of Control American Landscape [on an American Airlines flight to Las Vegas, Nevada] American Landscape [on the 11 bus, Albuquerque, New Mexico] American Landscape [neighbor under wisteria on Marquette Avenue] American Landscape [Friendship Park, San Diego, Tijuana] [four] Exit Birth Story Animal Mechanics Birth Story Nocturne Letters to Bernadette Notes Acknowledgments
"Roach is a reader of omens, of the shapes hidden in shadows, recasting the hard lessons of the natural world. 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 "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 amid the ferocious glint of this marred earth, desire sings. Stunning!"--Nomi Stone "Surveille brought me down to my knees in utter awe and ache. Roach's striking debut is exacting and lush, braiding and ricocheting off the pastoral and deeply psychological landscapes with probing depth and exquisite diction. Each line was a whole poem to me. Each line wrecked me with surprise and a sense of implication as the speaker surveys the American borders of the public and private consciousness with remarkable force and execution."--Tiana Clark "Through these wise, painful, and beautiful poems, Surveille investigates the intersections of local and global violence with deep concern, compassion, and precision. This book is a triumph."--Dean Rader
