Catherine Pierce is the author of The Girls of Peculiar (Saturnalia 2012) and Famous Last Words (Saturnalia 2008). Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry (2015 and 2011), Boston Review, Ploughshares, FIELD, and elsewhere. She lives in Starkville, Mississippi, where she is associate professor at Mississippi State University.

Other poems by Catherine Pierce in Verse Daily:
October 7, 2014:   "The Tornado Wants a Companion" "No one wants the whirling all the time...."
September 8, 2008:   "The Guidance Counselor to the Girl" "The test suggests an aptitude for solitary work..."
June 24, 2008:   "'This is Funny'" "Not the whiskey, though that, too..."
July 10, 2004:  "Nor Hell a Fury" "I am the step that creaks...."

Books by Catherine Pierce:

Other poems on the web by Catherine Pierce:
"Poem from the Hidden Passage"
"Chadwick Lake, 8:15 a.m."
"Disaster Work"
"The Tornado Visits the Town"
"Narrative Theory"
Two poems
Two poems
"Last Meal"
"Poem: Precautions"
"Dear Day,"
"Love Poem To America"
Four poems
"This Is Not an Elegy"
"Poem from the Girls We Were"
"Instinct"
Two poems
"Reading Faulkner at 17, You Foresee Your Reckoning"
"I Go Back to Ohio"

Catherine Pierce's Website.

Catherine Pierce on Twitter.

Catherine Pierce on Facebook.

About Tornado is the World:

"With a jeweler's eye and an uncanny knack for embracing devastating truths and desires, Pierce rewrites what it means to sift through wreckage of both heart and land. This book is, simply, exquisite."
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil

"With empathy, dazzling insight, and dexterity, Pierce sings in the voice of the tornado and the terrified, all while reminding readers of the potential joy still waiting for us amidst the destruction: that feeling 'when a red sun rises out of a place / you never thought could house a sun.'"
—Simone Muench

"Catherine Pierce likes to toy with fear the way it toys with us...Danger, in this context, unleashes her sense of play, her linguistic enthusiasm, triggering the very force that makes her world--and the world of her readers--more exciting. Here, menace is a muse, and Catherine Pierce a rousing poet."
—Bob Hicok