Joy Katz Joy Katz is the author All You Do Is Perceive (2013, Four Way Books) as well as two previous poetry collections. A former Wallace Stegner and National Endowment for the Arts fellow, she lives in Pittsburgh, Pa., where she teaches in the graduate writing program at Chatham University.

Other poems by Joy Katz in Verse Daily:
January 24, 2007:   "Daffodils." " God's cold call goes colder, goes black and white...."

Books by Joy Katz:

Other poems on the web by Joy Katz:
"Suicide Cascade"
Four poems
Five poems
"Baby Poetics"
Seven poems

Joy Katz's Website.

*Joy Katz According to Wikipedia.

*Joy Katz on Twitter.

About All You Do Is Perceive:

"Joy Katz is a receiver tuned to its highest possible sensitivity. Over and over, she brings in the faintest and most intimate signals--the ‘oiled sound of a dog’s dream,’ the ‘hurt growl’ of tape stripped from the roll, her baby’s ‘pah of little flame.’ ‘I will bind myself to the thinnest sounds,’ she says, ‘the feather coming out of its pillow,’ and with a hearing so acute that it is a kind of mindreading, she risks being swept away by talkers who just won't stop, ‘laughter like breaking plates’ and the ‘the sky...getting louder.’ Katz is an empath with no defenses, as in the brilliant parable of obsession where she finds us a seat next to her, helpfully inquiring ‘Can you see out of my eyeholes? Are you comfortable?’ In Eliot's words, she's a ‘soul stretched tight across the skies,’ and in her own, tremulous and sharp and pointing where we might not have seen, ‘a needle afloat on plain water.’ There are all kinds of reasons for reading these poems-- their deftness of movement, a whimsy that deepens into something like myth--but I am most grateful for the intensity and sheer intelligence of their feelings."
—James Richardson

"All You Do Is Perceive starts out with a poem for an adopted son and itself adopts the wide-eyed linguistic playfulness that marks other mother-poets such as Bernadette Mayer and Lee Ann Brown. While Kant warned us that perceptions without concepts are empty, Katz takes up the problem by its other handle and asserts that our perceptions of the world around us create a foundation for empathy."
— Ange Mlinko