Roach, Caitlin: Surveille

University of Wisconsin Press, paperback

Publication Date: November 12, 2024

Publisher Marketing: "It was breeding season, / wasn't it, and they were running from something," writes Caitlin Roach. Surveille's queer speaker is on the cusp of motherhood, vacillating between attentiveness and paranoia, surveilling her body, civic bodies, natural and political landscapes, and the child she longs to bring into--and ultimately protect from--this hostile world.

Exploring drone strikes, scorpion eradication, bird behavior, mating deer, ICE detainees, and family relationships, Roach's poems stare into and through the truth with a blazing intensity. She writes, "Still, I watch / the watcher watch me watch / the man standing in front of me / peering through the crosshatch / iron mesh, waiting for bodies / beloved he knows he cannot touch / to arrive on the other side."

Surveille is a book about people under various forms of control (self-inflicted and external), about watching and being watched (by oneself, by others, by the state), about mothering, and about the desperate search for meaning in a world that feels increasingly violent and filled with despair.

Hold the husk.
Suck each bead out. There
are degrees of loss, speeds
at which pain travels
through the body. See,
even the rose neck's bent. I do not
need to tell you I'm sick. I want to
be remembered for the absence
my body made in space.

--Excerpt from "Gardening, the mother gives her daughter a lesson on loss"