My Personal Favorite with Catharine Batsios

A Poetry Blog

Hi Everyone!

This blog only asks the poet to answer one two-part question:

At this moment in time, which of your poems is your personal favorite, and why?

Cheers,

Kelly

Other notes:

My Personal Favorite will be on hiatus through the holidays. See you in the New Year! Happy Holidays!

If you are looking for a good read, two of my favorite poets have new books out this month:

Robert Fanning: All We Are Given We Cannot Hold

Ken Meisel: Changing Names on Nameless Water

Also, check out Erin C. Murphy’s 2025 poetry round-up at The Summerset Review for more reading suggestions!

Cat:

This poem’s editorial & craft apocrypha is pretty inclusive of the story of my poetry journey. Streetlamp Nautilus was a name I gave myself while completing a poetry prompt given to me by my mentor, Diane Wakoski. The original first line of Form of Recollection was, “My name is Cat but you could easily call me Streetlamp Nautilus.” This poem is also the main intersection of my personal mythology as it is driven by surrealism/magical realism/nighttime cityscape. Form of Recollection has a sister called Form of Collection & there were supposed to be more siblings. I wanted to do a series of poems where I played the idea of the “Platonic Form” (which as a concept is singular) into a concept that is inherently plural (collecting, remembering, understanding, creating, etc) but nothing in that line of poetry struck me again after the first two. This poem is both an inclusive sample of my poetics & a loose thread. That contradiction itself is indicative of my writing. It’s turtles all the way down.

I love this poem because I can remember how irritated Korey Hurni [still might be] when he kept arguing, “FormS with an S!” & I would say, “No, it defeats the purpose.” This poem is also a personal favorite of Anna Newman who sipped tea & watched Korey & I bicker about titles. Legend says if you stir yr oolong with a touch of oatmilk counterclockwise at the stroke of midnight under a poet’s moon, you can still hear us bickering.

I just released my first book & this poem is nostalgic & I’m feeling nostalgic. This is the poem that cracked open the geode of nighttime writing. This poem gave me permission to call my city Atlantis & use that as a basis for analysis. Walking around at night is viscous like being underwater. This poem is a monolith overlooking other poems in the collection, but this poem is about everything. Including change.

The version of this poem that appears in Chrysalism Issue 0 & in my book is only 2 years old. I wrote this poem in 2012, the cityscape bits are the same but there was an overhauling of intent in the section starting, “I’ve bathed well..” all the way to “Aquila skims my sweat” in 2023 which changed the tone of the especially confessional stanzas where the speaker reveals themself through what was inequitably taken from them & what they do in response. In earlier versions of the poem, “retreat into mercurial tinti of insomnia” was something I felt the speaker & the thieving Aquila did together. In this version, the final one, Aquila goes into the loop by himself & the speaker finishes the poem as though they are surveying a sprawl of treasure rather than a loop of mourning.

Sprawl of treasure straight on through til morning.

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Poem: Form of Recollection (attached), found in my debut collection Streetlamp Nautilus (Luchador Press) & found in Chrysalism Issue 0

Bio: Catharine Batsios is from Flint, MI & has lived in Detroit since 2013 as a poet, teaching artist, & community literary organizer. Cat’s debut poetry collection, Streetlamp Nautilus (Luchador Press) is currently in the world & can be found online at Bookshop.org or in real life at Book Suey Co-op Bookstore in Hamtramck. If you wanna see Cat around town, check out A Detroit Literary Calendar.

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A little about your host, Kelly Fordon:

KELLY FORDON’s latest poetry collection, What Trammels the Heart, was published by SFAPress in 2025. Her short story collection, I Have the Answer (Wayne State University Press, 2020), was chosen as a Midwest Book Award Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist. Her first full-length poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House (Kattywompus Press, 2019), was an Eyelands International Prize Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist. It was later adapted into a play by Robin Martin and published in The Kenyon Review Online. Her novel-in-stories, Garden for the Blind, was published by WSUP in 2015. She teaches at Springfed Arts in Detroit and online, where she also runs a fiction podcast called “Let’s Deconstruct a Story.” http://www.letsdeconstructastory.substack.com.

What Trammels the Heart is on sale right now for 40% off at tamupress.com with the code HEART40 :) and Amazon here.

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This blog will be supporting Inside Out Literary Arts in Detroit until March 20026—or until we reach our $5000 goal! You can donate here, and please let them know I sent you. Thanks!