Catherine Pierce is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi and the author of four books of poems, most recently Danger Days (Saturnalia 2020). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, the New York Times, American Poetry Review, The Nation, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. An NEA Fellow and two-time Pushcart Prize winner, she is Professor of English at Mississippi State University, where she co-directs the creative writing program.

Other poems by Catherine Pierce in Verse Daily:
March 30, 2021:   "Abecedarian for the Dangerous Animals" "All frantic and drunk with new warmth, the bees..."
August 28, 2020:   "If/When" "The poem I planned to write..."
February 4, 2020:   "Entreaty" "Dear spring, commit. Burst..."
February 18, 2019:   "Poem for the Woods" "Not as I would dream them now, not with growls..."
May 22, 2017:   "The Town Dreams the Tornado Apologizes" "And then we woke up. And our uncles..."
October 7, 2014:   "The Tornado Wants a Companion" "No one wants the whirling all the time...."
September 8, 2008:   "The Guidance Counselor to the Girl" "The test suggests an aptitude for solitary work..."
June 24, 2008:   "'This is Funny'" "Not the whiskey, though that, too..."
July 10, 2004:  "Nor Hell a Fury" "I am the step that creaks...."

Books by Catherine Pierce:

Other poems on the web by Catherine Pierce:
"How Becoming a Mother Is Like Space Travel"
"All the Dead Animals"
"In Praise of the Horror Movie"
"I Kept Getting Books about Birds"
"Anthropocene Pastoral"
Three poems
"Poem from the Hidden Passage"
"Chadwick Lake, 8:15 a.m."
"Disaster Work"
"The Tornado Visits the Town"
"Narrative Theory"
Two poems
Two poems
"Last Meal"
"Poem: Precautions"
"Dear Day,"
"Love Poem To America"
Four poems
"This Is Not an Elegy"
"Poem from the Girls We Were"
"Instinct"
Two poems
"Reading Faulkner at 17, You Foresee Your Reckoning"
"I Go Back to Ohio"

Catherine Pierce's Website.

Catherine Pierce on Twitter.

About Danger Days:

"Danger Days boldly confronts political and ecological collapse head-on—and shows us that poetry has the ability both to chronicle and battle back the apocalypse, with brilliantly rendered moments of beauty, wonder, love, and sly humor. Pierce takes on lockdown drills, spiders, violent storms, carcinogens, toxic algae blooms, tender-age shelters, retreating glaciers, horror movies, dangerous animals and even quicksand—and weaves them into luminous odes to humanity and domesticity in the Anthropocene, giving us a way to muddle through. 'Darling,' she writes, 'here is a sky polluted / with our city. Kiss me under it."
—Erika Meitner