THE EMPTY SEASON by Catherine Bresner

Catherine Bresner’s poetry has appeared in The Offing, Heavy Feather Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Passages North, The Pinch, Handsome, and elsewhere. She has worked as the coordinating editor for The Seattle Review and as a publicity assistant for Wave Books. Currently, she is the managing editor for BOAAT Press and the associate production editor for Kirkus Reviews. You can find her work at www.catherinebresner.com.

Catherine Bresner’s first collection the empty season is a formally audacious, dexterous, & heart/filled book of bravery & strange. Head-butting the strictures that surround a traditional poem she collapses the collage, the erasure, the illustration, musical notation, the hyperlink, & the high lyric. One piece opens “Write, they say, like a band-aid / when writing feels like the wound.” & these poems perform both functions, the wound & the suture. This is a beautiful book. 

— sam sax

Beautiful and imagistic, the empty season feels as if it is being written in real time, with its contemporary ear and relevant sorrows. Indeed, this is a book of the times. The strong voice in these poems and poetry comics is innovative, fresh, sincere, and maybe most importantly, has an intelligent curiosity. “Today the chore of being alive” is what I feel when I look at these poems: gorgeous collage, illustration, language—that is the music that keeps me going as a reader. It is delicious to read and see this book in the world. 

— Bianca Stone

Catherine Bresner brings a freshly savvy vision to the conditions of modern life—to our broken intimacies with others, to our alienation from our own best selves, and to our impaired commitments to civic wholeness. Dark in its whimsy and subversive in its truth-telling, the empty season is full of a kind of Baudelairean spleen, bitter and exuberant at the same time. As one of Bresner’s speakers declares: “How knowledge can be a euphemism / for wreckage, as in I will wreck you.” That’s a fair—and most welcome—warning from a vivid new ironist in our poetry.

— Rick Barot

Catherine Bresner’s the empty season is an exquisite collection that comprises poetry, collage, illustration, and song. Her poems not only boldly challenge the ways that we as readers understand mental illness, femininity, cultural artifacts, and identity, but they interrogate the ways we understand the language of poetry altogether.

In her artist statement, Bresner writes, “When I create a poetry comic, I am writing from a place that is essentially ekphrasis in reverse. Typically, I will write a poem first and create a comic that complicates the first reading of that poem. I believe that the best poetry comics are ones that use images that are as mysterious as the language of poetry. Duplication is deadweight. Therefore, I like for a tension between word and image to exist, especially if metaphors are used. While I have illustrated comics in the past, digital collage seems well suited for the poems that I write. Just as I didn’t create language as a medium for poems, I didn’t create the images I collage together either. I am reminded of Jean-Luc Godard’s words, “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.” I always try to take my poetry comics to a place of instability, evocation, and conundrum.”

Snarky, bawdy, and tender, Bresner’s hybrid poetry collection is a starling first book.

Features, Interviews, & Reviews

• "Country of Misshapen Apples," Poetry Daily, 7 February 2019

• "Here Is Your Shopping List for Short Run Comix and Arts Festival 2018," Rich Smith, The Stranger, 2 November 2018

• "For the Well Intentioned Folks Who Say Writing Is Therapeutic," Verse Daily, 2 August 2018

• "Book Review of the empty season" by Kim Jacobs-Beck, Gigantic Sequins

• #metoo, #stopkavanaugh, and Poetry: Catherine Bresner on Poetry Comics as Feminist Writing by Chelsea Grimmer, The Poetry Vlog

• "Eden Comes Easily to Mind: Nine Questions with Visual Poet Catherine Bresner" by Jason Teal, The Fanzine

• "The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: the empty season by Catherine Bresner" edited by Tierney Bailey, The Sundress Blog

• "A Distrust of the Art Close Reading a Visual Poem and Two Poetry Comics" by Gabrielle Bates, Poetry Northwest

• "What I’m Reading Now…" by Piper J. Daniels, Tarpaulin Sky