Diamonds, 2021
“Diamonds presents a woman in midlife on the edge. In hilarious and heartbreaking poems, Camille Guthrie writes about the trials and surprises of divorce, parenting, country life—and the difficulties and delights of being alone, looking at art, and falling in love.
Witty resilience abounds in these irreverent poems about grief and desire—in which the poet meditates upon gender roles, history, pop culture, and academia. Guthrie subverts and teases traditional forms in an elegy about Sylvia Plath’s prom dress, a dating profile for Hieronymus Bosch, a sestina about beauty and power—with radical dramatic monologues in the voices of Madame du Barry, a Pict Woman, and more. Unlike Virgil, who refuses to guide this poet through her journey at midlife, Guthrie leads readers by the hand into a provoking, affecting journey of a break-up and a reconciliation with love.”
—BOA Editions
Preorder Diamonds (Forthcoming, October 2021 from BOA Editions)
Advance Praise for Diamonds
“The poems in Diamonds were written by a tiger who survived divorce, single motherdom, middle age, and sleepless nights worrying about money and what clothes to wear, one who knows it could be worse but wants her revenge, which is―surprise―the revenge of an angel who possesses such intelligence, knowledge, charm, and wit that these poems, from Björk to Bosch, pay us in diamonds and bless us all.”
―Mary Ruefle, Author of My Private Property and Madness, Rack, and Honey
“Camille Guthrie’s Diamonds is a glorious feminist midlife scream, screed, and ode to the ‘paradoxes and oxymorons’ of a divorced mother’s struggles. With the dark formal wit of Philip Larkin and cutting rage of Sylvia Plath, Guthrie goes there, with hilarious piss and vinegar, on the Sisyphean defeats of an academic stranded; a mother burdened; a consumerist broke; a woman who’s had enough. Plundering the wisdom from Shakespeare, Keats, and Butler, along with the wisdom of online flotsam, Guthrie creates a fresh ribald collection that is all too relatable and unputdownable.”
―Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning and Engine Empire
More Praise for Diamonds
“Diamonds combines the narrative style of Guthrie’s first two books with the sterling ekphrastic impulse of her third. However, rather than focus only on art objects, Diamonds engages other historical artifacts (like women’s fashion, including Sylvia Plath’s prom dress and a dusty rose Winter 2006 Valentino getup) as it considers major life events, like raising children or divorce. Articulated Lair is an under-sung masterpiece of a certain kind of ekphrasis, but Diamonds is Guthrie’s best book yet, and her most complicated, masquerading as her chattiest. Plus, it is very funny.” S. Brook Corfman, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Of course, poetry—and art—cannot solve these problems, or even inoculate us against despair when we have a particularly bad day, and Guthrie does not pretend that they can. (Indeed, her poems sometimes end with the sad sense of breaking the spell, of being forced back to where “We have serious work to do” and “the real prevails.”) But, as Diamonds demonstrates, poetry can offer us some relief, delight, and wisdom—here served up with swagger and outrageous inventiveness. For whether it’s in “Virgil, Hey,” or “My Boyfriend, John Keats,” or “Diamonds,” which begins with the line “Judith Butler, I am calling you out,” Guthrie playfully engages with serious writers and thinkers in addresses that are both colloquial and learned. Her list poems are as likely to include Rihanna as Hieronymus Bosch, Bjork as a female Pict warrior, sex fantasies as much as art, and laughter as often as sorrow. These poems don’t offer the escapist entertainment so readily available everywhere, but instead that rare thing for which we turn to poetry in particular: making, if only in the second circle, a heaven of hell.” Adam Scheffler, Harvard Review.
“These are wry poems, ones that move with heated blood and blistering vitality, wanting and alive.” Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe.
“Delicious, devastating, and decadently sexy, DIAMONDS by @guthrie.camille is part dreamy guided museum stroll, part break-up song, and each and every poem is in fact a resolute diamond, infused by the writer with sensitive wit, elegiac hilarity, whispered longing, and utterly divine feminism. An absolute pleasure to read. (I’m sharing “The Ideal Form” here, one of my favorite poems from the collection, but honestly it was soooo hard to choose…)” Shawna Kay Rodenberg, author of KIN: A Memoir
“This amazing book is proof that contemporary poetry can be as funny, relevant, beautiful, and gut-punching as a novel. DIAMONDS by @guthrie.camille is about what mid-life is like for mothers, as the author talks openly and honestly about her divorce, being a single mom, being a breadwinner, and finding meaning in the everyday. If you don't believe us, we've linked to one of her poems in our bio. It's just perfect.” Sarah Aswell, at Scary Mommy Book Club
“Diamonds also brims with passion and is riotously entertaining.” Ben Aleshire, Seven Days VT
“How much do I love this book? I checked my mail late last night and ended up staying up til 1 am to read this in a single sitting. With lavish and sometimes criminalish imagination and a centuries-and-continents-spanning reference set, this book is the kind of whirlwind I want to be swept up in again and again. Many thanks to the brilliant @guthrie.camille for writing these poems. I tip my feathered hat and curtsy at thy feet.” Devon Walker-Figueroa, author of Philomath
“Indeed, what I adore most about this book is that questioning and sass, like the best combination of flavors, that at once insists in a play on Hamlet’s hyperbolic metaphor, ““Marriage’s a prison / Then is the whole world one,” yet in the same space doesn’t bullshit the reader with the dishonesty of not wanting or missing a loving relationship, as in the title poem.” Bill Neumire, Verdad Magazine.
“Guthrie’s voice is smart, vulnerable, and funny. Diamonds educates and entertains, a bittersweet testament to the power of art and life’s disappointments.” Emily Pérez, RHINO Magazine.
“While there are always tones of seriousness (as well as of tragedy), what should never be overlooked throughout the collection is Guthrie’s humor, which we should not think of as an attempt to mask the themes she tackles, but rather as an attempt to envelop them in the totality of human emotions.” Esteban Rodríguez, Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado Review.
Articulated Lair, 2013
In her third collection of poetry, Camille Guthrie engages with Louise Bourgeois's deeply personal sculptures, paintings, and drawings in her own taut, emotive abstractions, carving new meaning out of a body of work central to twentieth-century art. The poet converses with the artist's preoccupations with love, alienation, sex, death, and identity. These poems offer a formally precise, playfully intense perspective—an essential vocabulary for monumental works. As Susan Wheeler observes, "Like Louise Bourgeois, Camille Guthrie makes great art from great discomfort. The rigor of Bourgeois's inner life and studio practice supports these beautiful improvisations like an armature over which a billowing fabric drapes."
—Subpress Books
Reviews for Articulated Lair
“Shake Forth a Nest: Feminist Ekphrasis and the Example of Louise Bourgeois,”
by B.K. Fischer in The Los Angeles Review of Books
"Camille Guthrie’s "Articulated Lair: Poems for Louise Bourgeois," by Molly
Sutton Kiefer in Pank Magazine
“Articulated Lair,” Publishers Weekly
“Why I Chose Camille Guthrie’s Articulated Lair for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club,” by Camille T. Dungy for The Rumpus
In Captivity, 2006
“If Guthrie's The Master Thief (2000) was a fable of fraught girlhood, this book's peculiar, post-adolescent parable of adulthood shows how sylvan ambition and unquenchable desire get shunted ("Like panthers in a parking garage") into a gendered, Wasteland-like confab of urban cacophony, loaded relationships and poisonous artistic rivalries—yet emerge "to show the whole scene in flames." With a mastery of archaic diction that recalls Susan Howe, Guthrie crafts an alternately sweet, harsh, seductive, loving and contemptuous female voice that loosely narrates a fall into love and writing (not necessarily in that order). At her most incandescent, she sounds like Susan Sontag as the love child of Robert Browning and Sylvia Plath: "I never wanted to be your handmaiden/ Pencil driving in a rose-entwined enclosure.// Put away the 15th century encyclopedia now,/ Reality-testing is what we're up to./ How does matter behave under tremendous pressure?/ I almost wrote pleasure." Litanies like "My Boyfriend" ("ribs like a bookcase"; "balls large as a boar-hound's") give way to mean serial poems ("Imposter! Why not move back to Boston[?]"), and to the gorgeous final "In Captivity," where "Girls hide make-believe artifacts under canopies/ Boys tear down posters and unload their pellet guns." It's a tough world, but Guthrie tracks its "rate of radiance" masterfully.”
—Publishers Weekly
Reviews and Praise for In Captivity
“In Captivity can be prized as an elaborate elaboration of simple looking as well as a clarifying encounter with deeply engrossed reading. Either way it's a heady, labyrinthian journey between the Cloisters and the New York Public Library. You have to pass through Camille Guthrie's wondrous head to get there, and you have to find your own way back. A captivating composition. A loving trap.”
—C. D. Wright, Author of One with Others
“Camille Guthrie's sharp eye for lyric detail, her use of shifting connections, narrative fragments, quotations, and demarcations have produced a haunting and powerful collection of meditations. In Captivity is a perfect example of the ways in which meticulous research, with its constant network of associations, can embrace extraordinary telepathic and telegraphic powers of chance and connectedness. This sequence is the work of an impressive new voice in American poetry.”
—Susan Howe, Author of My Emily Dickinson and The Midnight
“In meshing the more intangible, philosophical illusions and aspects of the hunt with the physical and personal, Guthrie achieves flexibility with a topic that could be dangerously limited.”
“There's an uncanny knowledge on display here, a rounded awareness of one's one darkest corners and the difficulties of an ambiguous cultural inheritance. It captivates me and I hope it will captivate many more readers.”
The Master Thief, 2000
“The Master Thief is a work of intricate architecture, allusive and elusive, as if one had been invited to a masked party in a remote gothic library, where the music is dissonant and the games as scary as a nightmare before a final exam. “I lay down on a bed of glass/ Small had mirrors examined my lunar profile/ When the giant imprinted its spine into my palm.” Like a modern Psyche, the heroine is tested. Her epic trials are turned by Guthrie into a compelling and ingenious vision”
—Ann Lauterbach, Author of The Night Sky and Spell
Chapbooks
Another Instance: Three Chapbooks: Jack Collum, Camille Guthrie, Mark McMorris, Published for Instance Press, 2011
Defending Oneself, Published for Beard of Bees Press, 2004