Catherine Gonick
Split Daughter of Eve
by Catherine Gonick
ISBN: 9781962405164
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Also available as an Ebook from online retailers: ISBN 9781962405171
Hear Catherine read from Split Daughter of Eve, YouTube, May 12, 2025.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including The Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Pedestal, The Orchards Poetry Journal, One Art, Of The Book, The Nu Review, and The New Verse News. Her work has also appeared in anthologies including in plein air, Poetic License Press; Grabbed: Poets & Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing, Beacon Press; Dead of Winter 2021, Milk & Cake Press; Support Ukraine, Moonstone Press; and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice, Anhinga Press. She is a winner of the Ina Coolbrith Prize for Poetry and was a finalist in the Louisville Actors Theatre 10-Minute Play Contest. A native of California’s Bay Area, she lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, with whom she works in a company that seeks to slow the rate of global warming.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In poems at turns lyrical and narrative, ironic and yearning, Split Daughter of Eve describes a lifelong attempt to arrive at a sense of soul, self, and worldly identity, from an initial dark mess of imposed meanings. This particular journey from childhood is informed by a split and warring religious inheritance (Jewish/Catholic) that intersects with incestuous shadings at home. What is sacred becomes hopelessly confused with the profane. Values urgently needed to live appear to have been lost before they could be understood, much less claimed. Questions of who, what, or why to believe, and what to stand for, are explored against a backdrop of places that include California, New York, Nevada, and Minnesota, as well as Poland, Ukraine, Israel, Italy, Spain and Turkey, while touching on history that includes pogroms, McCarthyism, Communists and Catholics, ancient mystics and martyrs, and the war in Gaza. The multiplicity of contradictions may well be unresolvable. Yet, as the poems demonstrate, sending in one’s own angel of imagination to wrestle with them can offer a little aid.
ADVANCE PRAISE
Split, cut in two, Solomon’s child, warring absence, God-dog, innocence and experience, the roots of Catherine Gonick’s poetry are ancient miscegenations, prohibited mixes, violence conducted in the birthplace of the peacemaker, crucifixion. And how do you get out of the maze? Poetry offers a solution, creation of lyric houses, exploration of all the dilemmas coursing through the blood. “Growing up split / half half / to whom did I belong?” This is Gonick’s question and her poetry is the answer. It is riveting, undeniable, necessary.
––Indran Amirthanayagam, Seer and The Runner’s Almanac
Early in her remarkable first collection, Catherine Gonick announces that “cultural math /confounds.” The speaker in these poems is confounded by the binaries that shape her life within what is an inherited culture. The list of binaries is long—mother/father, female/male, Catholic/Jew, religious/atheist, protector/predator—and to the speaker, none of these are simple or easy to understand. The title, Split Daughter of Eve, suggests at least one source of the problem. Unlike Eve, the mother who chooses to eat from the tree of knowledge, the daughter-speaker inherits whatever the progenitors have offered, a fait accompli. Eve cannot or will not protect this daughter who must figure it all out on her own. For Gonick, to be a woman is to be afraid existence is an ongoing state of split desire—both a longing for a protective mother (the image used is of an ancient and enveloping tree) as well as a longing for the erotic invitation of the father, something both tempting and frightening, a naked man cheerfully roaming a house filled with women. The speaker goes to “sacred spaces” and finds “an empty room.” Solace comes from the fierce refusal to turn away from what’s painful and confusing and difficult. In one poem the speaker describes climbing out of an abductor’s car to avoid what might have been rape or murder or both. The speaker’s courage and resourcefulness save her. By analogy Gonick knows that only by writing poems rather than explanations can she escape the binary traps. In doing so she does what poetry should do—instruct and delight. This book will stay with you; I recommend it highly.
––Ruth Danon, Turn up the Heat
Catherine Gonick scrutinizes, with ferocious reverence, what it means to embody multiple dualities: Christian and Jew, wife and lover, sister and daughter. She burrows into the fraught richness of legacy, re-visioning foundational stories and laying bare her attempts to “herd random angels”—of inheritance, of history—“with swift and furious gestures.” These poems never fall back on platitude, but rather, revel in the contradictory tapestry of everything we are blessed to inherit.
––Kristen Holt-Browning, The Only Animal Awake in the House
With exuberant transgressiveness, Catherine Gonick explores her dual inheritance, at once indicting and reimagining the stunting yet ineluctable myths of family and religion. “I knew nothing but was ready / for whatever came,” the speaker tells us early on, and this tone of wide-eyed canniness, something like the “organized innocence” Harold Bloom attributed to Blake’s Songs, suffuses the book’s arc. Pitch-perfect, epiphanic, and darkly funny, Split Daughter of Eve is a collection I’ll reread for years.
––Natania Rosenfeld, The Blue Bed
Catherine Gonick is a poet of strength, skill, authenticity and soul. In this collection, she shoulders the task of trying to reconcile the cultural and religious misalignment in her upbringing that’s complicated by the sexual malfunctioning in her childhood home. Somehow, the grace afforded by a heroic Holocaust survivor, and her life-long fascination with the charismatic Christ, pull her up from a well of darkness to end with a feeling of mild, unforced, unsentimental hope.
-–Janet Ruhe-Schoen, Rejoice in my Gladness: The Life of Táhirih
