Caw by Michael Waters

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In passionate poems about sin, obsession, and mortality—an artist’s infatuation with a doll, an interspecies relationship, an ex-lover whose presence lingers in recipes, ecclesiastical birds, and a sex toy holding a loved one’s ashes—Waters delivers impeccably crafted narratives infused with his signature lyrical gestures. At the book’s core is a sequence of 25 poems on aging, dementia, and caregiving, chiseled phrase by phrase toward unflinching and memorable closure. Caw is a brilliant, intimate and moving addition to Waters’s body of work and may be his most powerful collection yet.

Michael Waters is the author of twelve previous books of poems & editor/co-editor of six anthologies, including Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). His recent books include The Dean of Discipline (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), Celestial Joyride (BOA, 2016), and the anthologies Border Lines (Knopf, 2020) and Reel Verse (Knopf, 2019). His book Darling Vulgarity (BOA, 2006) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (BOA, 2006) was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. A Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Fellow, and NEA Fellowship recipient, Waters lives without a cell phone in Ocean, NJ.