Whenever my writing career first began in 2015, one of the first voices I became obsessed with was that of Catch Business’s. Not only did her poems become a physically visceral image for me to gape at in all of my teenaged and wanderstruck glory, but her mysterious online persona made me want to read more of her work. Business is one of the best poets in the alt lit community because of her ability to reach into the void of the unknown parts of our world and grab the things that only the light can see. Business’s ability to verbalize the unknown is exemplified in her new book quick fix, out with one of my favorite publishing houses, 2fast2house, this year.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t ridiculously excited to read Business’s new work. In this book, Business explores the duality of fear and love and how often we become walls in the way of ourselves. Business uses her chameleon like super powers to mold her personal experiences around the reader’s’ own and make art that is lived by everyone; I literally feel as if have been living with these poems my entire life. A great example of this is within “when do you open”:
creating tension to feel your future
don’t let the future hold you back
explore guilt
an application of patience
inspiration like needing to shit
Business has no shame in exploring the uncomfortable in the soft, malleable world that we are living in, and I think that’s why I love this book so damn much. Business pleads with her audience to not just stop at how language can affect and shape our environment, but how our energy influences everything we breathe. Business understands the power of her language, and is able to take that a step forward into the physical world. Business doesn’t want to just talk about it, she wants to feel it too. She wants to be able to tell her story through her mind and not exclusively through her mouth; that is something incredibly special.
This book deals with a love that can only be described by the cliche “right person at the wrong time”. Business’s ability to simply verbalize her pain into wavelengths that are incredibly effective and understandable is another part of her art that I find to be beautiful. Something that truly hit hard was in the poem “aren’t you listening”:
words mean something else
to everyone else
This simple recognition of how language registers differently for each person is probably my favorite theme within these poems. Poets so often focus solely on the language rather than what the poem makes the reader feel; Catch is able to both realize a poem’s verbal worth while creating a physical space for these words to find a home in.
Finishing this book made me kind of sad; it’s like a list of feelings I’ve harbored forever that I want to continue to be listed off. Catch Business is the absolute queen of providing a framework for the reality that we all share differently. Business’s new work questions the way we communicate, and how often we fall into the ill choices of how other people choose to say what they feel.
PREORDER HERE at 2fast2house