Nervous Device

Catherine Wagner

In *Nervous Device*, Catherine Wagner takes inspiration from William Blake's "bounding line" to explore the poem as a body at the intersection between poet and audience. Using this as a figure for sexual, political, and economic interactions, Wagner's poems shift between seductive lyricism and brash fragmentation as they negotiate the failure of human connection in the twilight of American empire. Intellectually informed, yet insistent on their objecthood, Wagner's poems express a self-conscious skepticism even as they maintain an optimistically charged eroticism."