“Here’s a book you will not put down. Like climbing “a fiery stairway,” or finding the unlikely “encounter between a piano and a Rothko” in a garden, like entering “Kafka’s garage“ or “floating down the highway/ in a snowstorm” Cathy Colman’s stunning second poetry collection, Beauty’s Tattoo enters a place of fearlessness. Her contemporary range of topics excites the gallery of possibility, and there, emerging from a “fugitive kind” of exile, the body’s wild card is played against the mind in a kind of self-reflecting dissonance and philosophical insight that can only belong to beauty and its many incarnations. Edgy and simultaneously elegant, Colman’s language is always musically and imagistically alive like a snake at both ends: it works like consciousness overhearing itself. Beauty’s Tattoo is moving and funny. One thinks of Andre Breton’s concept of passion (Colman’s “passion like water” floods these poems and carries them far into our memory), with its wild magnificent eyes having to “Mix in the human struggle” in order to be authentic, to be troubled by beauty, to be known and known again.”
—Elena Karina Byrne
“I’ve been an admirer of Cathy Colman’s work for over 15 years now: her intoxicating blend of stop-in-your-tracks imagery, her lettuce—crisp diction, the mixture of Eros, imagination, and longing. These new poems courageously step into the darkness and emerge with beads of light.”
—Jeffrey McDaniel
“Although the realms of dream and desire permeate the poems in Cathy Colman’s ravishing new collection, Beauty’s Tattoo, it is the way experience itself marks us that this book so powerfully envisions. Cathy Colman shows us how living leaves the evidence of its passage along the lengths of our bodies, both without, and within. The many poems cast as letters in this collection are emblematic of one of the book’s central ambitions—to establish a potent, rock-solid bridge of intimacy between the poet and her readers. Cathy Colman’s exquisite poems are epistles to the past, reflections upon the future, and heart-breaking meditations upon the metaphysics of daily transcendence. This is a book to treasure.”
—David St. John
