With fearless and playful language, Katherine Factor’s debut collection reveals agony, humor, and the necessary voices of the female oracle through time. The oracle’s message is apparent—she is not dead. Her words are cryptic but contemporary, offering caution along with guidance to a society interested only in using prophecy for profit.
In a time when only a select few are prosperous, A Sybil Society paints a portrait of the present moment and unveils a restless truth. The collection is fearless in the face of convention and gives readers a sense of devastating sorrow in a world gone mad.
About the Author :
Katherine Factor is an editor, book coach, and children's book author. She has her MFA in Poetry from The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and has held positions at Idyllwild Arts Academy and Interlochen Arts Academy. She is a recipient of grants from the Iowa Arts Council and the Arts Enterprise Laboratory for supporting projects publishing young writers. Her poems and audio work can be found at Interim, The Conversant, Quarterly West, Poets for Living Waters, The Equalizer, DIAGRAM, Colorado Review, Coldfront's Poets off Poetry, and on WFMU and textsound.org.
Review :
"Factor's is a poetry that strikes with the speed and charge of lightning. Ping, sting, and tingle. Afterward, a "flush and flow." Yo, goddesses, witches, and sisters--behold, Katherine Factor's poetic effort to rematriate!"
--Jami Macarty, NewPages Blog "In A Sybil Society, Katherine Factor has made a new prosody, using urban slang, internet shorthand, and all the variations of American English in the twenty-first century, a system of new sound that refuses easy epiphany, offering instead a twisting language, mad speaker, and always original address to try to reach us, here, on what's left of our earth."
--Ronaldo V. Wilson, member of the Test Site Poetry Advisory Board, author of several poetry collections, and winner of the Pushcart Prize
"Yes, I want to morph exploitive logics into deep fungal punster connectedness. Here comes A Sibyl Society. Rampaging, delicate, muscular, hilarious oracle, please tell us what to do!"
--Catherine Wagner, author of Of Course
"Throughout this marvelously sparkly, quick-witted collection, sound leads the mind, mining rhyme, echo, pun, and any number of other verbal gymnastics. Tone leads, too; a rather sassy contemporaneity reigns--it's delightful and incredibly smart. If you're looking for the oracular, this Sybil is, per tradition, utterly cryptic, and yet her take on the future feels firm. And firmly rooted in the magic of language; as Factor says, "Best to let the alphabet / sail in."
--Cole Swensen, author of Art in Time
