The Haunting

About the Book

A collection of poems concerned with how the living and the dead coexist, how to survive trauma, and the power of persistence.

The Haunting is a book of feminist-horror visitations, incantations, and possessions embodied in unruly forms that subvert genre and generic definitions of poetry and prose. This is a collection that is concerned with how the living and the dead coexist, how to survive trauma, and the power of persistence. Drawing from a variety of texts including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, twentieth-century horror films, the Velvet Underground, and Ovid, The Haunting explores the anxieties of ancestral and artistic inheritance, rage, transformation, motherhood, maternal ambivalence, and the drive to create.

Table of Contents:
5 Note Stitched Above the Monster’s Eye
6 Abstract
7 The Worm ~
8 The American Way of Death I
9 Bingo of Brides Stripped Bare
10 Note Stitched Inside the Monster’s Mouth
11 ~
12 The Alphabet
13 Revenge Body
14 ~
16 Wuthering Heights, Volume I
21 Horror Movie Bingo
22 Note Stitched Across the Monster’s Cheek
23 Carnival of Souls
24 Psycho
25 Psycho II
26 Carrie
27 Prom Night
28 ~
29 Gaslight
30 Leave Her to Heaven
31 The Heiress
32 Suspiria
33 House
34 Vertigo
35 ~
36 Rosemary’s Baby
37 Hereditary
38 Picnic at Hanging Rock
39 Camp Crystal Lake
40 ~
41 Brood
42 DIY Bingo for the Living and the Dead
43 Note Stitched Across the Monster’s Wrists
44 All Tomorrow’s Parties
45 Python a l’Orange
46 Hush
47 The American Way of Death II
48 Dark Archive Bingo
49 Note Stitched Inside the Monster’s Ear
50 Wuthering Heights, Volume II
61 The Three Beating Hearts of a Headless Queen
62 Note Stitched Across the Monster’s Ribs
63 Notes and Acknowledgements


About the Author :
Cate Peebles is the author of Thicket, as well as five chapbooks, including Sun King and The Woodlands. Her work has appeared in numerous print and online magazines, such as the American Poetry Review, Bayou, Bennington Review, DIAGRAM, diode, Ploughshares, and Volt. A coeditor of the occasional online poetry magazine, Fou, she is an archivist living in Pittsburgh.

Review :
"The Haunting is a stunner. Through bodies of humans, pythons, foxes, and worms, a personal mythos of madness and desire—and how to survive both—emerges. These poems are formally dexterous, employing everything from erasures to bingo forms to lyric prose shaped by its shifting margins. And every form is soaked in rich language, a feast of the dictionary and the senses. The poems held me spellbound page after page as they “refilled the grave with breath.” This collection is spectacle and spectacular. It lit me up like a Roman candle." "Cate Peebles’s The Haunting channels Mary Shelley’s storytelling with vibrant breath-work, this coupled with film & cinema, churn an arresting “refill[ing] [of] the grave,” so to speak. The poems throughout the collection display a masterful measurement of feeling: carrying the pages to and from ethereal and declarative worlds and artfully bringing sentience to horror. Her engaging poetic form(s) for “horror movie bingo,” for example, examine contemporary culture astutely. I believe readers will remain both haunted and captivated by her energetic feminist traction and verve." "In Cate Peebles’s poems the elemental worm is intensely at work, lingering, towards metamorphosis. I see the worm too in the forward slashes that systematically beat time throughout The Haunting. I feel it too mirrored in many of the images: “one finger/ your birth/ pitched to death/ rigid vein-wrapped femur,” moving in guises. There’s deep myth here, as Peebles taps into symbolism and precise, haunted language. Visually superb, these poems look light, almost disappearing in their delicate control upon the page—however, it is in their fierce voice that we find a counterbalance of weight and rage, as the speaker reckons with allusions to indignities suffered by women—on both an intimate and expansive scale. One leaves these poems with rich questions about where the so-called monster; the world inside us an outside us, and what it takes to create meaning out of all of it." "The Haunting moves like a lake flooding through a burst dam. In imagery of primal intimacy, Peebles conjures a self of desire & fury. The book is rooted in horror movies & the Brontes & Mary Shelley & it nods toward both Alice Notley’s & H.D.’s very different forms of transcendence, but most striking is its incantatory voice, precise & ruthless, even in delicacy. Read The Haunting out loud, shout it out to a thunderstorm." "Gothic bliss. Exquisite macabre. Honestly, this is how I want to consume all of my horror, in uncanny image after uncanny image, luxuriating in pure dread. Planning to memorize this book and repeat it to myself as a pledge and a curse."