Dear Beast

Overview

Catherine Pierce’s stunning fifth collection is alive with creatures: blue herons and spiny orbweavers, questioning wolves and very human Beasts. These vivid, tender poems—of earth and animal, pandemic and family, rage, longing, and sea-deep love—urge us to remember and fight for our vital interconnectedness. “How could I be any way but staggered?” writes Pierce of the wild world, before acknowledging the paradox of loving the earth as it’s dying: “What I want is to know about endings and still love each wingbeat, each shade / of the boundless, darkening sky.” Dear Beast is a love letter to our planet and its creatures, and a song of empathy for the beastly human animals that we are.

Author Biography

Catherine Pierce is the author of the poetry collections Danger Days, The Tornado Is the World, The Girls of Peculiar, and Famous Last Words, as well as the memoir Foxes for Everybody. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The Nation, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere, and has won two Pushcart Prizes. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Academy of American Poets, she served as Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2021 to 2025.