Sacrificial Steel by Cate McGowan

Description

Driftwood Press, paperback

Publication Date: June 17, 2025

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Cate McGowan’s Sacrificial Steel uses art, history, and complex, musical poetic lines and forms to explore the biggest question we have as humans: what does it all mean?

“Sacrificial Steel is a stunning debut collection, bright as a lighthouse flashing into the dark. These poems hide from nothing, illuminating truths about both the vicious and beautiful possibilities of our world. They embody the sublime and are breathtaking in their precise candor.” —Erica Wright, author of All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned

“A wonderful addition to contemporary poetry, Cate McGowan’s Sacrificial Steel cuts lyric vision with punk swagger and mordant humor to examine womanhood, history, family, ecological disaster, and Southern identity. I am gobsmacked by the precision and restraint that characterize these impeccable poems—every syllable, every character, every space. Like her contemporaries, feminist poets Cynthia Cruz and Aracelis Girmay, McGowan possesses a fine intelligence that is matched only by her conscience. These poems affirm that it is now, as it has been, the poet’s work to ‘clock the universe’s massacres, dark / soffits, underhanded sky.’” —Carolyn Hembree, author of For Today

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