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Cass Garison
They/Them
poet & artist
Cass Garison is a poet & artist with an MFA from University of Washington, Seattle. Their first chapbook, "Beauty Exasperated," is available through Common Meter Press. They are a 2023-2024 Hugo House Fellow and have work published at Poets.org, in Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, Foglifter, & others.
Cass hosts an annual poets & artists retreat in Darrington, Washington and was a part of the Pennsylvania Public Poetry Project in 2019. They have attended Writing Workshops in Greece, the Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop, and the Winter Tangerine Writing Workshop. They received the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Joan Grayston Award from UW Seattle.
About Their Work:
Like a statue that jolts expectation behind an elegant contour, Cass Garison’s poems wear their language easily, so that the language seems offhandedly confessional. Big mistake to take that as fact; these poems are mirrors not just of the perturbations of self but the ways that frangible fiction blurs into the rest of reality. They address others, their bodies, our thoughts about them and their bodies, the present and remembered natural world, the present and remembered world of painting and sculpture. They take place in real places broken up by flickering memory. They make it clear how all we perceive, fear and desire perturbs the “I” we imagine. And they convey all this in vivid lyrics, ones with “room to be reckless//and colloquial” but also to convey something beyond the obvious, “not warmth/ but something so divine/ it is almost/ unbearable.” One can’t read these poems without feeling how exhilarating and painful it is to be “I,” and they left this “I” breathless.
Follow On:
IG: @cassgarison
Website(s):
Books (for purchase):
"Beauty Exasperated" (Common Meter Press)
Online Work:
Checkout Cass' portfolio of online work on their website.
Read for Margin Shift: