about CU T
About CU T
What binds the poems of CU T together is a desire to speak what goes unspoken. To reply into the void of empire and late capitalism with a howl of authenticity, not trying to separate parts of the self or parts of the culture, but to exist in all of it at once. This book is a portrait of survival through speech, story, politics, celebrity/star gazing, TV, and all forms of popular music. These poems engage with “Western tradition” and its unraveling, focusing on an economically insecure adjunct life in Pittsburgh, PA which is—against all odds—interrupted by love that entails moving to a safer country. These poems exist in conversation with the author’s conservative Catholic upbringing, anti-imperialist and anti-racist politics, and poets ranging from Sappho to Elizabeth Bishop to Eazy-E. The poems inhabit a world where John Wayne stars in Manhattan and Rush Limbaugh stars in Boys Don’t Cry, with elegies to Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, and Tina Turner, finally culminating in a finale where the author rewrites (or translates, or reboots, or “covers”) T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (with a little help from Cyndi Lauper and Buffy the Vampire Slayer).
Praise for CU T
This astonishing debut by R/B Mertz is not something you read and forget. At the quietest, most unexpected moments, you can feel these poems riding over the tracks they laid across your body. "Edge of human & / seasonal ex- / ploitation," yes, poetry that knits into our DNA.
--CACONRAD, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return
This book is visceral and cutting, vulnerable and brave. Throughout, Mertz explores the “deep breaks” caused by transphobia, racism, and other forms of American violence. At the same time, they celebrate the joy, pleasure, and other “flickers / of light that come through / the cracks.” Each page feels like a transition towards a multitude of voices that proclaim: “we are not / leaving, we are not giving up this garden.”
--Craig Santos Perez, author of [amot] and Habitat Threshold
“I got my voice like this the old-fashioned way, with cigarettes, with fire ...will telling the truth always have to feel like a fire?” With CU T, R/B Mertz does that rarest of things, they invite you to enter > “you know you—you’re not afraid of the shape of your desire, just your desire.” Knowing the significance of how we are entered & what enters us, each poem each blade, “like the removing of obstacles ... my darling, I love all of your atoms. If you like, I will open my skin for you” where EVERY QUEER IS A PARADE as you trip over the third who is always walking beside you, “slippers and hoodie, hooded I can’t tell if it's a girl or a man or a woman or a —is it just someone you keep inside of you?” Mertz sees you a part of this burning world “(come have a drink with me on the back deck)” & is now a part of me forever. CU T is the company you keep.”
-- Kirby, author of She & Poetry is Queer
R/B's debut poetry collection, Cut, has the kind of motion poets and readers of poetry live for: running our eyes down the page quickly, but carefully, so that I can touch the next line while still feeling the fleshy bits of the last. This book is for them and for us, for any of us who know that "the blueprint of your body" is not who you are and the pain that lingers underneath, even under scars, will always show through. Being lost in this beautiful book makes me grateful to be alive in such a trying time.
-- Rachelle Escamilla, Monterey County Poet Laureate 2024/5, author of Space Junk from the Heavenly Palace