Call the Catastrophists

Fiery and fine, Krystal Languell's Call the Catastrophists is a "Whoomp! (There it is)" of a first collection. Amused, bemused, explosive, defused, beautiful, ass-shaking, self-effacing, serious, then distant, then wise, Languell's register-shifting magic in these poems is worth the price of entry. You'll be coming back, though, for the heart. —Ander Monson Krystal Languell traverses memory and desire with a tough-minded concern for language’s (in)ability to mean. Place and language collide, collude, and collapse everywhere, producing subversions of the order/system of all things: catastrophe pervades. Call the Catastrophists interrogates—colloquially, effortlessly—the damage done to us by language. There is perhaps no greater challenge for the poet, and perhaps no better poet to engage it than Languell. —Carmen Giménez Smith Okay, what should I call them? Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk-nyuk. Anything but late for supper! Ah-cha-cha-cha! Krystal Languell’s poems are a lot funnier than those jokes. And sadder. And far more perceptive. And maybe they’re not so much about pulling the rug from under language as they are about getting down on the carpet and helping you to look for your lost contact lens or to scrub up the wine you just spilled. These are poems by a human being who reminds you that there are more of us (from wherever it is we came from) both behind and in front of this book. —Graham Foust What then is a catastrophist? In the cosmography of this incredible first volume, she is a mobile force that screams: There is plenty to say, say it, say it! In the case where it is the critical reality of the daily life of a person, a thinking person, a person with a sex that is not one, with a class not a cache, who bumps against reality being easily bruised, and doing it again, and saying so. Krystal Languell reinscribes poetry to its rightful spot where we begin, and keep beginning, inside our catastrophe, where it lives. —Rachel Levitsky