My New Job

"Catherine Wagner's My New Job might be the last great book of the oughts. Part of its delight is that it is not constant. Its eyelid adjusts and flutters throughout. It's three books at least: fuzzy portraiture of energy and thought like early moderns: Arthur Dove and Georgia O'Keefe- and even like Pound, in Wagner's familial way of tugging at language. It's also a bit Don Juan (as in Castaneda). It's a new age book: searching, awkward and useful too- a momentary sex manual for girls- then a dirty adult notebook. My New Job is physical, a shucking work. One picks up some spin on Sylvia Plath but what I truly felt was Frankenstein. My New Job is tinkering with life. I found myself imagining Wagner wondering what else Plath might have done- not instead of killing herself but what if she just wrote something different. Frankenstein kept Mary Shelley alive for a very long time while Ariel simply pointed to Plath's own demise. In My New Job 'The women step out, the men go in' and the edifice C. Wagner's made seems an increasingly wider and wider kind of turning- colossal and somatic- through her own body & the bodies of others. Cathy's Job is a joyous multiple. It's a lift."--Eileen Myles