A witty and elegiac new collection from the author of "exhilarating, fierce [and] powerful? verse (Robert Pinsky, Washington Post).

The speakers of Oracle occupy the outer-borough cityscape of New York's Staten Island, where they move through worlds glittering with refuse and peopled by ghosts?of a dead lover, of a friend lost to suicide, of a dog with glistening eyes. Marvin's haunting, passionate poems explore themes of loss, of the vulnerability of womanhood in a world hostile to it, and of the fraught, strangely compelling landscape of adolescence.

Cate Marvin is the author of Fragment of the Head of a Queen and World's Tallest Disaster. A winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize and a Whiting Award, her poetry has been published in the Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, and elsewhere. A cofounder of VIDA and a professor of English at CUNY, she lives in Maplewood, New Jersey.