CATHERINE THEIS
POET, PLAYWRIGHT, TRANSLATOR
CATHERINE THEIS
"Acting needs witnesses, a whole theater of citizens."
ABOUT
Catherine Theis is the translator of Slashing Sounds (Chicago Press’ Phoenix Poets Series, 2024), the first collection of the Italian poet Jolanda Insana to be published in English. She is the author of MEDEA (Plays Inverse, 2017), an adaptation of the Euripides story. Her first book of poems is The Fraud of Good Sleep (Salt Modern Poets, 2011), followed by her chapbook, The June Cuckold, a tragedy in verse (Convulsive, 2012). Along with editors Susan McCabe and Steven Minas, Theis is editing The Sound of the Past: Modernist Echoes and Incantations, forthcoming from Vernon Press. Her contribution includes the essay, "What's Your Final Destination?: Place in Mirrlees, Eliot, and the Modernist Long Poem.”
Her newest collection of poems, By a Roman, will be published by Antiphony Press in August 2025.
Theis has received various fellowships and awards, most notably from the Illinois Arts Council, Del Amo Foundation, Gold Family Foundation, and the Ugo Da Como Foundation. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. Theis’ scholarly interests primarily focus on the intersection between translation, poetics, and performance studies. She teaches in the General Education program at USC. Recent course offerings include "Through the Viewfinder: Literature and Photography" and "Green Worlds: Ecopoetry."
Her work has been published in a collection of essays titled Classics in Modernist Translation (Bloomsbury, 2019), a volume that addresses modernist engagements with the literature of Greco-Roman antiquity. Her contribution, “Braving the elements: H.D.’s and Jeffers’ ‘transduction’ of Euripides,” explores the similarities between poets H.D. and Robinson Jeffers and their interest in the choral odes of Euripides’ The Bacchae. Read a review of the book here and here.
BOOKS
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SLASHING SOUNDS
Jolanda Insana’s Slashing Sounds uses invectives, fragments, epigrams, and epigraphs to construct poems that pulse with the texture of an idiosyncratic Sicilian dialect. The poems in this collection are ferocious, irreverent, strange, snarky, and otherworldly. Insana’s commitment to contentiousness, her brutal and skeptical eye, and her preoccupation with language make Insana’s poetry particularly arresting. For Insana, there is no subject more worthy of our interest than language’s misfires and contradictory impulses—language being the ultimate arrow, forging a direction in the world and forcing a turn toward whatever reality appears in front of you.
Published by the Univeristy of Chicago's Phoenix Poet's Series, this first book-length collection of Insana’s poetry published in English, Slashing Sounds is a powerful offering that addresses a lack of female Italian voices in Anglophone poetry publishing.
MEDEA
Through a mix of sound-poems, dance, and traditional scenes, Catherine Theis attempts to jostle Medea from her traditional, male-defined narrative in this modern retelling set in the mountains of Montana.
A 2015 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers finalist, MEDEA features a Chorus of Flames, choreography for The Milky Way, and a collection of palate-cleansing satyr plays to be performed after. Grappling with both love and language, Theis' Medea "wants to join with the world, to meld with it. Let's let her do that—see what falls away."
Read the reviews:
in Full Stop
Read an interview:
with James Pate in Entropy
Performance produced by Poetry Is
THE FRAUD OF GOOD SLEEP
The Fraud of Good Sleep is a book of “serious humanist” poems. Theis’s poems combine a stunning, classical rigor with a passionate madness that is utterly contemporary and surprising. From prose poems and extended lyric sequences to translations and fragments, this book attempts to enfold the living past into the insane present.
"Paradise Sauna" from TYPO
selections from The Fraud of Good Sleep
‘Catherine Theis’s The Fraud of Good Sleep is a riotous and refined celebration of language. It is elegant and erudite without ever being stuffy, and surprising at every turn. A truly dashing collection, full of glitter, and everywhere intimating the “joy in the mountains very near.”’
—Maggie Nelson
‘With The Fraud of Good Sleep, Catherine Theis gives us poetry as sensuous, glinting energy. Swerving between the intimate and the adamant, these poems feel like letters written to you by someone who’s in love with the world—someone whose eyes and heart are wide open, who’s learned (and keeps learning) from the ancients, who can mingle her voice with Sappho’s and smile wickedly at Dante. There are musings on cities and foods (“Who will bring the chocolates weather permitting?”), mock lectures, disarming wisdom (“Fidelity, the sea we share in peaceful times”), and exhortations to live—to live well. “My concern,” writes Theis, “is with circumference, many-faceted / crystal wine glasses, Roman aqueducts, all sorts / of highway thinking.” These are poems flashing with wonder and humor, but “roughed in sorrow,” hard-won in their realizations. They are full of the bright ache of being alive.’
—Joanna Klink
THE JUNE CUCKOLD AND OTHER TRAGEDIES
The June Cuckold floods us in the erotic vegetable splendor of an English garden. Amid “the underneath whispering of peonies,” a chorus of insects bears witness to the exploits of Emily and Ray, a photographer rake. From the same bower, Emily’s daughter Peyton lives as a botanical aesthete, snapping photos and making sketches in charcoal, “mindful of my mother’s garden map.” And Samuel, Emily’s husband, reflects with detachment on the tragedy, ecstasy and doom stitched together by “the liberal thread” of life. What ensues is a simultaneously epicurean and meditative ensemble of voices that confirms Walter Pater’s suspicion that “the way to perfection is through a series of disgusts.”
PROJECTS
NEW POEMS
"Various Instructions for California," from Denver Quarterly
"The Beginning," from Guesthouse: a panoply of modern writing
"Excerpts from Your Baby Book," from The Account
"Imaginary Lives," "In the Unresolved Cadence," "New Year's Day," and "The Vacant Seat," from Firmament
"Wildfires" from Prelude
"A Whole Army to Feed" from Quarterly West
selections from "Buen Clima" from Dream Pop Journal
"A Work of Art" from Yalobusha Review
"Aphorisms" from Diagram
"On Not Understanding Greek" from Tarpaulin Sky
NON-FICTION
"Indecipherable Hieroglyph," from Annulet: A Journal of Poetics
"Performing the Classics: Alice Oswald and The Vanishing," from Interim
"How Far the Fall: A Lyric Essay in 20 Acts" from The Spectacle
"Speechless Complainer, What is it Like?" from The New Orleans Review
"Shocked into Speech" from At Length
TRANSLATIONS
"I said nothing," and "An old pleasure," The Massachusetts
Review, Volume 65, Issue 3, Fall 2024
"Noose soaked in orange blossom water,"Jolanda Insana, The Paris Review, No. 245, Fall 2023
"Translation, free and wild" from Jacket2
IN THE NEWS
Read about Insana's poems in the Global Literature In Libraries Initiative
Slashing Sounds featured in What to Read for Women in Translation Month
Read an interview about my translation process here.
Read a feature about my life's choices here.
