CavanKerry Press, 2021

Cat Doty’s newest collection of poems can be ordered through CavanKerry Press, University of Chicago Press, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.

When William Carlos Williams wrote “Memory is a kind of accomplishment,” who knew he was writing about Cat Doty and her long-awaited second volume of poems? From the mean streets of mid-century Paterson where she is accosted by an inexperienced mugger and the weekly confessional which she leaves with a “head full of sin and two Holy Cards” to the temple of the boardwalk arcade, Doty’s “accomplishment,” takes us on a hurricane-in-a-whirling-teacup rush that is both alarming and beautiful. I found myself reading these poems so many times, I swear, I thought my eyes rubbed the ink from the pages.
— Peter E. Murphy

Catherine Doty’s Wonderama delves gloriously into the shame-filled mess of searing poverty, and finds wonder there, in the absurdity of human meanness, our stupidity, frailty, madness and kindness. Doty drops us directly inside childhood experience without sentimentality. Despairing as they sometimes are, these are not poems of despair. She’s not looking toward heaven to justify the suffering of the people in these poems. She knows they can’t afford such luxury. Instead, with compassion, humor and often astonishingly beautiful imagery, Doty invites us to stay right here, rooted to the earth with her and them. We’re grateful for the invitation.
— Martin Farawell

In Catherine Doty’s poetry the lyric gift and the comic gift are so finely interfused that you can turn a poem inside out and not expose a single seam. Over and over in her poems, these two rarest of gifts react, and produce the mysterious virtue called style. In Doty’s first book of magic, Momentum, I thought I was just being sledded too fast to see how it was done. Now we have this Wonderama, with its more relaxed texture and magisterial tempos—and I still can’t see how it’s done. But that is a wonder for the way home. For the most and best of this book’s wonders, just open the gate and walk through.
— Robert Carnevale

CavanKerry Press, 2004

Runner-up for the Paterson Poetry Prize (2005)
ForeWord Magazine Book of Year Bronze Award (2004)

Those moments in childhood that shape who we will become, and all that will come to define our lives, dominate the poems that Catherine Doty has gathered in this poetry collection.

With humor, affection and a sharp awareness of the larger truths that can be found even in the mundane, Doty explores the luminous, sometimes curious relics of memory.

...a book of intense and affectionate metaphor. There are “dust storms/in the canister of sugar,” aquariums evolve inevitably into “twenty-five gallons of well-lit bouillabaisse,” and her father’s revving of an outboard motor mounted in an oil drum says all that can be said about going nowhere. The magical and the daily keep turning vividly into each other, and Doty can hardly decide which she loves more.
— James Richardson

At its best, poetry manages the feat of being unerring and fallible at the same time, of communicating a simultaneous sense of the rich shakiness of the present moment and the hard weight of the past. Over and over, Catherine Doty succeeds in poems that are engaging, shrewd and brimming with actual feeling. When I write “actual” I mean neither emotionally tethered nor shouting but willing to endure and celebrate the real emotional skeins and stains that constitute real lives. She has the knack and she knows how to use it.
— Baron Wormser

Employing brief, almost journalistic sketches punctuated by passionate language, Doty creates a virtual photo album that begins in 1960s Paterson, New Jersey...Personal as her poems are, they have the power to evoke memories in anyone who has ever been a child. Recalling her childhood home in Paterson, Doty celebrates those small, seemingly insignificant details that define not just a space but a life...
— The New York Times

Catherine Doty’s Just Kidding provides a pleasant respite from adulthood. And, unlike Ponce de León who felt a lot older after failing to find the fountain of youth, her sharply drawn cartoons plunge you back into childhood and leave you feeling younger and refreshed.
— Hal Sirowitz