A Finalist for the 2002 ForeWord Poetry Book of the Year   Fabulae Poems by Joy Katz   March 2002 ISBN 0-8093-2444-X, $14.95 paper 88 pages, 6 x 9 Poetry   The Crab Orchard Series in Poetry John Tribble, series editor “Joy Katz is the quintessential storyteller, spinning her marvelous tales out of the gossamer of the imagination, but always with the goal of capturing the flash and flicker of the real world. In her fine nets, she defamiliarizes the history we thought we knew and weaves her own voice, brilliant, mocking, passionate, clear as a bell, into the muffled sighs of a history that’s been hidden from us. But the pleasure of reading Fabulae comes also from the way the elements of narrative, from the simple to the fabulous, are compressed into beautifully crafted poems. There’s no background hum in this wonderful book—no skimming allowed. Katz combines the art of the fabulator with the art of the sculptor. Hers is a distinctive and original voice.” —Maura Stanton, author of Glacier Wine     “The coordinates for the landscape so beautifully staked out in Joy Katz’s Fabulae are language and desire, the dangerous and the fear that we might ‘like it like heaven . . . and be lost.’ In poems shot through with grace, intellect, and control, Katz considers the history and culture we all stand, finally, as heirs to: from Dachau to the deceptively still surfaces of American suburbia, from Proserpina to Plath, from the subjugation of women to the lust for empire—the result is a collection as rich as it is ambitious, announcing an already accomplished new voice in poetry.” —Carl Phillips, author of Pastoral   In Fabulae, Joy Katz interrogates the physical world, constructing a sensual and striking autobiography. She turns to the familiarity and strangeness of the female body, its surfaces and inner workings, often, although her subjects range from Thomas Jefferson to an Adam and Eve plagued with obsessive-compulsive disorder to the streets of New York’s diamond district. The poems, by turns funny and philosophical, point to how we suffer from desire: the danger, she writes, is that we might love the world “like heaven and be lost.” But they come back to delight in a flawed world especially the palpable beauty of words, and even the erotic shapes of the letterforms that make them up.    Joy Katz held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University and the Nadya Aisenberg Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. She has taught literature and writing at Stanford and at Washington University in St. Louis, where she received  her M.F.A. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including Antioch Review, Chelsea, Fence, and Southwest Review. She was trained in industrial design and works in Manhattan as a graphic designer, editor, and writer.    Photograph of Plath   Because her lips are parted roughly, shaped like a scream, I want to turn away for a second   as if she were the young girl burned by napalm. But I know she isn’t suffering, only speaking.   So I look, the way I looked through The Bell Jar for words that pointed somewhere you can’t get back from.   When I crossed the border to that other country myself, a woman said to me, very gently, you walk like a foreigner.   Is there anything hidden here, in her face? (Snow-fields hoarding white owls)   I want to let it land on my sleeve and let it fly back.         Falling 2.  Heroin   What would happen, they said, is that we would like it, and then we would do anything for it.  The drug seemed like chalk dust or powdered orchids, and I dreamed at night about the needle:   dragonfly metal and a barrel like clouds, plunger pushing waves of liquid like melted nacre.  It would feel like clouds, I imagined—“opiate,” opaline slipping-down feeling of sleep coming on.  They would push the tine into the nearly-finned skin between my toes, the tiny veins—   I ran into my mother’s bed, clenched my legs to my chest, clenched my feet into my hands, and lay awake all night sweating and cleaving.  I would like it.  I would like it like heaven and would be lost.