Cathleen Calbert

On Sleeping with a Famous Poet:

"Cathleen Calbert's Sleeping with a Famous Poet is a glorious romp of a book. She explores male and female relationships--through post-confessional modes, myth, and pop cultures--with hilarity and poignancy. Calbert's poems are sassy, sexy, smart, and full of pizzazz. Her formal innovations include poems that zigzag down the page, soap opera-inspired rhyming couplets, and an astounding re-imagining of Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book. Her energy is dizzying. Her voice is enthralling. The poems in Sleeping with a Famous Poet burst from the page."
--Denise Duhamel

"I think of Cathleen Calbert as a poet who investigates and celebrates intimacy. She is fascinated by our means of connecting--through speech, culture, sex--and details our movements toward and away from each other in a way that balances intellection and emotion. It’s no surprise that language is the fundamental intimacy for any poet, but in Calbert’s work, the distance between the body and what can be said is almost erased . . . . Calbert’s vision is sensual and generative. This is a powerful book."
--Bob Hicok


On Bad Judgment

"Cathleen Calbert, in her tour-de-force second book of poems, Bad Judgment, takes on the role of fool: donning masks and costumes, spinning out lines of rapid-fire witticisms. Her narrator is mercurial, moving in an instant from cackling laughter to sobs . . . . In Bad Judgment, Cathleen Calbert dazzles, wounds, and delights."
Liz Rosenberg, The Boston Globe

"The mordant, deadpan attitude of Calbert’s second collection finds its appropriate subject matter in the figures that populate her poems: vampire cats and bloodsucking babies, death-warmed-over boyfriends, black-clad academics on the beach. In a dream world full of the living dead, Calbert’s voice is the insistent, up-and-at-‘em whip. These poems have an ironic mission to locate the spiritual and spirited; they blow on the ashes with provocative language and the imperative’s urgency . . . . Calbert presides authoritatively over her own work, and her judgment is refreshingly sound."
--Publishers Weekly


On Lessons in Space

"Cathleen Calbert's Lessons in Space is a wonderful, truly distinctive debut. These poems are richly narrative in a way that has the formal and imaginative dash of real poetry, enlivened by a fresh, untamable spirit."
--Robert Pinsky

"For all the toughness, asperity, gall in her exacting inspection of those circumstances we find so hard to make out—adolescence, marriage, love, la condition féminine—there is an abiding sweetness in Cathleen Calbert’s poems, honey at the heart or at some other center. Her poems are like pomes, indeed, delectable within the rind, but guarded, sly."
--Richard Howard

Cathleen Calbert is the author of three books of poetry: Lessons in Space (University of Florida Press), Bad Judgment (Sarabande Books), and Sleeping with a Famous Poet (CustomWords).

Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous publications, including Feminist Studies, Fiction, The Hudson Review, Ms. Magazine, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and The Women’s Review of Books.

She was awarded The Nation Discovery Prize in 1991, the Gordon Barber Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America in 1994, the MacLeod-Grobe in 1996 and the Bullis-Kizer Award in 1998, both from Poetry Northwest, and a Pushcart Prize in 2001.

Currently, Cathleen Calbert is a Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Rhode Island College.