Cate Peebles' debut book of poems, Thicket, is deft and ideal in its pertinence to our current moment while also reaching both back and beyond itself. In the long poem, "The Woodlands," Peebles writes: "When the flood comes / we will be on our phones / searching for how / to save ourselves from / the flood." The sigh of recognition, of "so true," will be a constant companion for readers of Thicket. Peebles considers the female figure in the world in this #MeToo moment.
"What a masterful, mysterious first book. I love these poems for their totally clear, dream-like permeability. I am particularly blown away by the long poem that anchors the book, 'The Woodlands,' which has an extraordinary, tender wildness: it reminds me of my favorite surrealist novels, while also managing somehow to be deeply personal. I look forward to reading these poems, again and again, with growing admiration and joy."
—Matthew Zapruder
"…[Thicket] is Capricornian, as the speaker says of her sun sign, ‘a shaggy goat on an alpine ledge,’ and it is pleasurably sonic and surprising and smart.”
—Rachel Moritz at Lost Roads
Entering Cate Peebles’s debut collection, Thicket, is like stepping into a modern fairy tale or fable, replete with animals, primary colors, and questions about what sort of impression we each leave on the world at our end.
—Lisa Higgs at Kenyon Review
“…Peebles remains skeptical of the neat ‘box in a box’ that is our life in language, leveling these criticisms from within the most familiar of poetic structures. She gestures at the violence implicit in imposing an arbitrary structure on ‘real life,’ yet also the necessity of shared experience of language for creating a feminist consciousness.
—Kristina Marie Darling at Plougshares
“Peebles strikes a difficult balance between the craftiness of her finely wrought sentences and the directness of some of her assertions.”
—Elizabeth Hoover at Iowa Review