
Sacrificial Steel
Cate McGowan's Sacrificial Steel uses art, history, and complex, musical poetic lines and forms to explore the biggest question we have as humans: what does it all mean?
"Sacrificial Steel is a stunning debut collection, bright as a lighthouse flashing into the dark. These poems hide from nothing, illuminating truths about both the vicious and beautiful possibilities of our world. They embody the sublime and are breathtaking in their precise candor."
—Erica Wright,
author of All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned
“A wonderful addition to contemporary poetry, Cate McGowan’s Sacrificial Steel cuts lyric vision with punk swagger and mordant humor to examine womanhood, history, family, ecological disaster, and Southern identity. I am gobsmacked by the precision and restraint that characterize these impeccable poems—every syllable, every character, every space. Like her contemporaries, feminist poets Cynthia Cruz and Aracelis Girmay, McGowan possesses a fine intelligence that is matched only by her conscience. These poems affirm that it is now, as it has been, the poet’s work to ‘clock the universe’s massacres, dark / soffits, underhanded sky.’”
—Carolyn Hembree,
author of For Today
Cover Artist: Justin Limke
Cover Designer: Sally Franckowiak & James McNulty
Cate McGowan is an artist, critic, historian, and the author of three books. Her collection of memoir essays, Writing is Revision, will be published by De Gruyter Brill in 2024, and her novel, These Lowly Objects, appeared with Gold Wake Press in 2020. McGowan’s short story collection, True Places Never Are, won the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award in 2014 and was a finalist for the Lascaux Prize. Cate’s poetry, essays, and stories have appeared in numerous literary outlets, including Norton’s Flash Fiction International, Glimmer Train, The North American Review, Stonecoast Review, Chestnut Review, Shenandoah, Citron Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Tahoma Literary Review. Professor McGowan (known as McG to her students) holds an M.F.A. and Ph.D. and is currently pursuing another advanced degree at Johns Hopkins University. She regards teaching as her lifeblood and lives in Florida with her husband and animal family, but remains deeply connected to her progressive Southern roots in Atlanta, Georgia.

Poetry Collection
Genre
Release Date
06/17/2025
Page Count
104
978-1-949065-35-0
ISBN
$19.99
Price