by Rheanna Haaland

Catching Narcissus is a collection of poems which form a smooth, yet unsettling, reflection of the critical loathing and lustfully egotistical self. Through the intermittent lens of mythology and too-real modern life lessons, it is a story shaped by the caveat: “this is going to hurt.” From its old-flame trick-candle arsonist love story to the hydrocodone overdose, Haaland examines—and attempts to reconcile—recovery from crippling addiction and the endlessly resurrected, unwelcome love it both nurtures and asphyxiates.

About the Author

Rheanna Haaland (she/her/they/them) could say this book is about you. But it isn’t.

Haaland was raised by wolves on the prairie but relocated to Minneapolis, after finishing a bachelor’s degree in writing. Unsatisfied with writing alone, they considered several additional lines of work to compliment the necessary exorcism of poetry (including but not confined to copy editor, bookseller, web series producer, script writer, prep cook, pizza transportation specialist and actual batman). Haaland settled finally on pursuing a career as a surgeon.

While currently attending Northwestern Health Science University Haaland also works as a medical scribe in a local emergency room. (Countless HIPPA-compliant stories about will almost certainly prompt future collections. She loves it.)  She will remain in school for the foreseeable future, while continuing to write.

Haaland was the 3rd place winner of the 2018 Erotica Grand SlaMN Championship for spoken word poetry. Their work has appeared most recently in Auk Contraire, and The Same. The poem “—Me, Everyday” was previously printed in the 2019 edition of Red Weather Magazine, alongside many of her other pieces not published in this book. Haaland’s first collection An Eyeful of Hennepin Neon (The Poetry Box, 2018) is available through The Poetry Box website. She lives in Minneapolis with her outspoken tabby cat, Brummell, whose input on molecular geometry and organic chemistry homework is less than helpful. Both of them thank you for reading this far.

Early Praise for Catching Narcissus:

Rheanna Haaland’s book, Catching Narcissus, interweaves themes of classical mythology with stark overtones of mental torture and struggle. Themes of obsession, heartbreak, narcissistic abuse and recovery are all present in this wonderfully executed work, reflecting the authentic reality of human emotion when faced with the unnatural reality of loving a Narcissus. Absolutely worth a read for anyone who has struggled with love, loss, abandonment, or narcissistic abuse. Haaland’s words cut to the core of the human experience.

—Liz Collin (Red Eye Ruby)

R. S. Haaland takes you behind the eyes of a character tortured by addiction, obsession, and the allure of the darker things in life. Catching Narcissus is a sympathetic story with an undertone that is both unsettling and genuine.

—BIGnick, Kaleidoscope Nights

From broken to passing, Catching Narcissus begins fragmented and broken and ends with an idea of composure that invokes hope for a future. Haaland climbs out of a hole, carrying all the baggage that came out, and finds a way to survive. Mechanically thoughtful and brutally honest, Catching Narcissus doesn’t pull punches, even when those punches are directed inward.

—Tim Nunes, Senior Editor at PlayStation Universe

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by Lauren Tivey

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winner – First Place, 2019

Moroccan Holiday is a poetic series following a married couple—an American woman, and her Scottish husband—on an extended vacation in Morocco. As the husband suffers an extreme alcoholic relapse, the couple confronts longstanding issues of disease, abuse, and painful family memories, against the rich backdrop of an unfamiliar culture.

Judge’s Comments:

“Lauren Tivey embarks on a trip to Morocco, a foreign landscape of exciting people, smells, and destinations, with her alcoholic husband. She carries with her a dread of what she may face with her husband’s disease in a Muslim country. In beautifully-executed and moving poetic forms, she takes the reader with her through the landscapes of Ramadan and his alcoholism, family histories with drunkenness and rehab, and her moments of stillness when she is alone with mint tea and her journal. We feel how hard it is to stuff love, fear, and compassion in a suitcase just to unpack again in a new port of call.”

~ Tricia Knoll, Contest Judge, 2019
author of How I Learned to Be White and Broadfork Farm

About the Author

Lauren Tivey is the author of four chapbooks, most recently Moroccan Holiday, which was the winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2019, and The Breakdown Atlas & Other Poems (Big Table Publishing Company, 2011). Tivey is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her work has appeared in Connotation Press, The Coachella Review, and Split Lip Magazine, among dozens of other web and print publications in the U.S. and U.K.

After much international travel, including a six year stint living in China, she now resides with her husband, and a little black cat named Poppet, in a cottage surrounded by flower gardens in St. Augustine, Florida. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Flagler College.

Tivey can be reached at her writing blog: https://laurentivey.wordpress.com

What They’re Saying  . . .

In this stunning collection of finely wrought poems, Lauren Tivey writes of a holiday with deep pain and small joys. The speaker takes us on a journey of trauma as her husband relapses into alcoholism during the vacation, and tells of her difficult responses to his behavior. His disease of unrelenting suffering transforms the couple. He is, she says, “…a brute / swimmingly sloshed…” and she wonders if she can “…save him / somehow from chasm’s edge.” She writes “I keep talking to fill the silence, the absence / of his presence, in a blue city beyond the sea.” The poems are, in fact, brilliantly alive with shades of blue, some bright and cheery, and others darker, more sinister. As this couple journeys, she is wracked with agony, though the speaker does find momentary happiness that her husband’s “…eyes are clear in the luminosity / of negative ions—sea, sun, wind—an elemental / cleansing.” These poems pull the reader in with their heartbreaking urgency, history, and quests. Deeply moving, always expressing complex ideas in radiant language and astonishing details, Moroccan Holiday is a must-read book that sings the duality of love and estrangement.

~ Virginia Chase Sutton, author of What Brings You to Del Amo

These poems, gathered so astutely in Moroccan Holiday, have such exquisite and crisp detail that they will haunt you for a while. “Circus,” “The Nomad,” and “Hunger” are a few perfect examples, among the many in this book, of poems that will take you by the throat and choke you with their undeniable power and brilliance. Rich images, lyrical lines that are relentless in their beauty. These poems resonate with a lush wickedness of the tongue “of two broken people craving delights of the orchard” and the bitterness of people who’ve had to battle alcoholism and marriage and love for a long while. “I’ve grown tired of the stale taste of beer, bars, men. There are better things to do.” These are magnificent poems written against the backdrop of our crumbling world, Morocco, and beyond.

~ Virgil Suarez, author of 90 Miles: Selected and New Poems

Written with startling poignancy and richness, Lauren Tivey’s collection of poems, Moroccan Holiday, narrates a couple’s troubled voyage to a place “used to ruin,” seesawing between the splendor of its setting and the upcoming catastrophe into the depths of alcoholism and its legacy. The book starts “on a boat…gliding across the iridescent bay” on way to holiday, and quickly thrusts us into the precipice of Tangier, with its one-legged beggar, insane woman with oozing skin lesions, and scattering rats, which parallels their descent and struggle to prevail, as individuals and as partners. The poet asks, “I want to know when / to give up on someone.” The reader is left pondering this and other brutal questions, but it is clear that “moments of gladness exist.” Tivey’s work is a compelling case study, both fascinating and surprisingly compassionate, absolutely worth reading.

~ Carolina Hospital, author of Key West Nights and Other Aftershocks

Travel and travail share a common root, revealing at a deep linguistic level that to journey is to suffer. Change and transformation are by nature difficult. The travelers in Moroccan Holiday do indeed go far, traversing physical continents and emotional minefields. Lauren Tivey is an uncanny poet, conjuring metaphor and image to convey the tale of a husband and wife at the edge of love’s limit, where they are pushed by his relapse into alcoholic toxicity. The weight of their pasts and the exhaustion of carrying it all provide a sharp contrast to the cinnamon-scented streets and lush-laden markets of Morocco that would otherwise have beguiled them. The poems deliver a mix of seduction and despair, sorrow and enchantment (so many names for blue in this heady place). Through travel and travail, the woman and man somehow endure, learning how to lay down the burdens handed to them long ago and to take delight in the pleasures of their precarious present.

~ Holly Iglesias, author ofSleeping Things

Lauren Tivey’s Moroccan Holiday is a gorgeous, heartrending blue tempest that charts the roughhousing of addiction in a dry land with rich diction, depth, intelligence, and awareness. Despite tumult, the center never wavers, clear among the significant lost boys, the poems’ hope and generosity rising like Morocco’s pink wild roses and, yes, they do make a “difference to the world.”

~ Liz Robbins, author of Freaked

Book Launch & Readings

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