Notarikon includes Catherine Bowman’s signature narrative-meditative poems—bountiful and confrontational, funny, heartbreaking, and wise—as well as a formally inventive one-thousand-line poem written in one hundred ten-line stanzas, each line made up of ten syllables. The poem is both map and meditation on forgetting and remembering. Numeric and alphabetic systems, tens and 10s, punctuate this homage to a ten-year marriage, a decade, music, food, and New York City. In “1000 Lines” the stanzas, even the tiniest syllables, become wonder cabinets filled with mementoes and fragments as the speaker, a self-described pseudo-numerologist, obsessively attempts to retrieve an irretrievable past and to reveal and access the world through the powers of ten.
The College of Arts