Dear Beast - by Catherine Pierce (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Catherine Pierce's stunning fifth collection is alive with creatures: blue herons and spiny orbweavers, questioning wolves and very human Beasts. These vivid, tender poems-- of earth and animal, pandemic and family, rage, longing, and sea-deep love-- urge us to remember and fight for our vital interconnectedness. " How could I be any way but staggered?" writes Pierce of the wild world, before acknowledging the paradox of loving the earth as it's dying: " What I want is to know about endings and still love each wingbeat, each shade / of the boundless, darkening sky." Dear Beast is a love letter to our planet and its creatures, and a song of empathy for the beastly human animals that we are.

Review Quotes

"Some days I wear the world / like a skin," Catherine Pierce confides, and in Dear Beast she maps every nerve ending of that overwhelming intimacy. These poems are survival manuals for living where school lockdown emails arrive alongside nature documentaries. Pierce creates creatures--The Whywolf, The Whenwolf, The Howwolf--that embody our modern anxieties, transforming abstract dread into something we can name. She moves from cosmic to domestic with such clarity, watching a heron fly across the clear blue sky with the same defiant audacity we need to keep going. Pierce writes the poems I want to read--and the poems I wish I had written. Necessary and urgent. "Let us all / be disturbances now."

--January Gill O'Neil

Believe me when I tell you: In this era of profound ecological devastation, never have I encountered poems that speak so directly to me, so much so that Dear Beast--equally rife with lamentation and praise for this battered, gorgeous world--haunts as if speaking from the very inside of me to myself. The undercurrent whispering throughout could only come from a force like Catherine Pierce who has been paying attention for a long while now, who has had the courage not to turn away, and this necessary collection is further proof not only of her steadfast gaze but her resilience and good humor. Simply put, she says in these striking poems what most of us dare not say, even to ourselves, and she says it in a way that we cannot but listen.

--Nickole Brown

About the Author

Catherine Pierce is the author of the poetry collections Danger Days, The Tornado Is the World, The Girls of Peculiar, and Famous Last Words, as well as the memoir Foxes for Everybody. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The Nation, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere, and has won two Pushcart Prizes. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Academy of American Poets, she served as Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2021 to 2025.