By a Roman by Catherine Theis

68 pages

First edition: October, 2025

ISBN 979-8-9907346-4-7

By a Roman includes meditations on the role of the female artist, motherhood, and language itself. What does it mean to daydream, to cast ourselves into others’ most intimate lives, or perhaps into our own various selves? These poems chart those mesmerizing moments when the invisible forces of the world appear visible. A “Work of Art” includes the life and times of the poet, Catherine Theis, while other poems record Bacchic reveries in a landscape lit by fire and ruin, places where the speaker registers “a pleasure / cracked deep from one’s mineral self.”

In By a Roman, Catherine Theis strikes and maintains a balance few poets manage to achieve—again and again she writes her lines to the exact point beyond which their energy would dissipate, and breaks them there. Most poets break their lines before their lines reach that point, some break their lines after. But that point is the point of the greatest tension, and because Theis is so skilled at finding and utilizing it, her poems often rattle with a beautiful, violent power. She never arbitrarily generates that power, nor does she let it go to waste. With it, she infuses her poems with life—By a Roman is alive as few books are.

—Shane McCrae

Catherine Theis’s By a Roman is a spiritual diary, a record of encounter with the sweetness that “floods the perimeter,” overflows the riverbank, even when the river is dry, even as the world and word is burning. What is that sweetness and from where does it emerge? This question animates every line in these poems of devotional query, of motherhood, of wonder, watchfulness and deep listening. “I eat cake with all my brothers and sisters,” writes Theis, and that sugar in the mouth, like the eucharist, like breastmilk and blood, is never only other, is always also all. This is poetry in its most ancient function: as invitation and invocation, as recognition of the mystical unsaid that resides within language, within body, within world. Read these poems slowly, to remember.

—Julie Carr

Catherine Theis brings her savoir faire with the literatures of antiquity and translator’s ear to her incantatory By a Roman, whose music (“My mouth a plum a bonne a bruh / a broken brother rent with parts sent / the mescal smoked then choked”) fuses witchy Shakespearean word play to bracing contemporary critiques (“The poetry doesn’t mean / much anymore”; “The book written right now is called Spectator”; “the piss stink / of various ruins”). Endowed with a profound sense of what’s lost when the theatrical—and poetic—arts are undermined, Theis stages a textual performance of self, history, religion, and motherhood: a directorial tour de force elevating the female body (“my blood cresting in rivulets”) and voice to the pitch of oracle and holy writ, inscribing a space—“a possibility . . . in difference”—for the “essential thing.”

—Virginia Konchan

Catherine Theis is the author of the poetry collection The Fraud of Good Sleep, the play MEDEA, and translator of Slashing Sounds, the first collection of the Italian poet Jolanda Insana to be published in English.