Description

Culled from six previous collections, Scorpio Rising: Selected Poems, is the culmination of a thirty-five-year career. Katrovas’s early poems reflect a harrowing childhood on the highways of America as his parents fled the FBI. They also probe the gas-lit backstreets of New Orleans’s French Quarter where “the protean human heart/is nature’s crime against us.” Witness to Prague’s Velvet Revolution while on a Fulbright Fellowship, Katrovas in his later poems meditates upon his own American identity as he raises bi-cultural, bilingual daughters. Katrovas’s formal verse has an edge we do not usually associate with traditionally formal poetry. Understanding that all gendered identity is a construction, Katrovas explores, as few lyric poets have, the linguistic and emotional contours of “masculinity.”