By a Roman, Catherine Theis
October, 2025
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."
Excerpts from Catherine’s project may be found at:
Denver Quarterly (print)
Guesthouse: a panoply of modern writing
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.