The Haunting

“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.”

—Jac Jemc, author of The Grip of It and Empty Theatre

“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.”

—Mathias Svalina, creator of The Dream Delivery Service and author of Thank You Terror

“Cate Peebles’ The Haunting channels Mary Shelley’s storytelling with vibrant breath-work, which, coupled with film & cinema, churns 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.”

—Prageeta Sharma

“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.”

—Bianca Stone