KIRKUS REVIEW: CAUGHT IN A CAT ROMANCE
"A personal, vulnerable volume of poems about loving cats." — Kirkus Reviews
The professional review from Kirkus is in for Airie McCready’s CAUGHT IN A CAT ROMANCE. Kirkus has been a trusted professional book reviewer, serving booksellers and librarians since 1933. They’re reviews go a long way. Read what the pros have to say.
AUTHOR-PHOTOGRAPHER Airie McCready; PHOTOGRAPHED by Jeff Bray ‧
McCready celebrates her pet cats in this illustrated poetry collection.
To be a cat owner is to spend innumerable hours entranced by the things your cats do. The author, a prolific documenter of her cats both in photographs and in verse, knows this all too well. “I have a camera that’s inside my eye,” begins one poem. “My little babies are always posing for me. / Sometimes they run, and sometimes they play, / then my minds eye video stores it all away.” In these 24 poems, McCready praises her many cats, current and former, documenting the joys and trials of cat ownership. She composes odes to particular cats, like Devlin and Rhys, and writes from the perspective of others, like the “terrible and alone” Daisy. Her cats are of the sphynx breed, some short-haired and some hairless, and the poet relishes in the unusual aesthetic of their wrinkled skin and bat-like ears: “A thing that might seem odd and wrong, that looked as ancient as a crone, / someone once found beauty there, and now I’ll never be alone.” McCready grapples with the occasional heartbreak, like the strange illnesses cats sometimes get, or the knowledge that she will outlive them: “Eventually they always go / In the back of our mind we knew, we know. Love in a body will never stay, although we wish it was that way.” The rhyming verses are full of memorable figurative images, as here when the author describes the cats sleeping on her bed at night: “Tonight my bed’s like a sanded shore, / where naked sun worshipers have come to snore.” The poems are accompanied by photographs of the cats by the author and Bray and by McCready’s illustrations, most of them realistic though some fantastical (including, in one disturbing tableau, two cats spliced into Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, reaching toward one another with human hands). The book captures the strange worlds pet owners create for themselves and their animals, and while fellow cat owners may or may not enjoy these highly specific poems, they will undoubtedly recognize some of their own obsession.
A personal, vulnerable volume of poems about loving cats.
RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2025
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