A Cat Lover’s Guide to The Bell Curve

Brooks Haxton

Pigs may be the most intelligent
of the domestic animals,
but next to pigs cats look like
geniuses for diet, caterwauling
sex, longevity, and hygiene.
Sows suffocate their young
by accident, or swallow them
alive on whim. I’ve seen them
puke their breakfast in the dirt
and eat it warm for lunch, their faces
smeared with shit. The poor,
some experts say, are less intelligent
than the rich. This they prove
with numbers from a test
which, I’m just guessing,
is the one they use on pigs.

 
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Brooks Haxton has published fourteen books of poetry, translation, and non-fiction, including new collection of poems just out from Knopf, Mister Toebones. He has taught for many years in the graduate writing programs at Syracuse University and Warren Wilson College.

New York, New York

“There’s something bardic about Brooks Haxton’s Mister Toebones, the way his little narratives spin toward bone-hard insight through almost-melody, beguiling music. The poems travel far—from a mollusk in the mouth of a lover to the desolate moons of Jupiter—but their music, the deceptively simple chords of real lived wisdom, is persistent. A short poem near the middle of the collection, ‘A Cat Lover’s Guide to the Bell Curve,’ is alone worth the price of admission. Horace said good poems must ‘delight and instruct.’ Mister Toebones is full of very, very good poems.”
—Kaveh Akbar

“I have always known Brooks Haxton’s work to be full of curiosity and vision about anything he turns his eye and thought to, but Mister Toebones takes that wild, lyrical, wayfaring intelligence even further. These poems explore the mysteries of our world, of the human and creaturely journey, ever more powerfully in lovely, musical lines. It’s as if the poet has seen and done everything, knows gently everything. I loved this book. Brooks Haxton is one of our finest poets, and he has outdone even himself in this one. Read slowly, savor, and see.”
—Richard Bausch

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