Four Year Anniversary Gift: The Collected Poems of Catherynne M. Valente (That's Me!) (Patreon)

Four years ago in March, I started this little Patreon.

In the time since, you and your amazing, astonishing support have made it possible for me to live between novels, to not have my house fall down around my ears, to have any kind of peace of mind, and to have an actual human child, a whole person who will grow up and do things and meet people and affect the world like the ripple of a little pebble, a being and a soul who would not exist without your patronage, month by month.

There is no real way I can say thank you for that. There is no way to repay what you have done for me and mine. It is a small miracle, and every single day I am unfathomably grateful.

But I want to try! I want to try to give back a little of the grace you have given me. And so I have put together special gifts every year on our anniversary, to try to be a little extra for you, in return.

I was late this year.

But only because this is a BIG ONE. And world events have been PRETTY BIG. 

But it's done*

What you will find attached to this post is my complete poems to date. 1999-2021. I have never collected them before. You cannot get them anywhere else. There are even poems in this manuscript that have never been published, including...GULP...juvenalia. UNLABELLED SO YOU HAVE TO GUESS WHAT I WROTE WHEN I WAS 19. 

It is a 350 page manuscript.

I always wanted to have a Collected Poems. As a girl who grew up worshipped the Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and Edna St. Vincent Millay. To me, those words meant you had Made It.

But you have to be extremely famous to get that sort of treatment these days. And even if you are, it's an uphill climb to get a publisher to do it.

But hey, now we have the internet!

At some point, I will very likely formalize this manuscript and publish it officially, on Kindle or otherwise. 

But that is not now. 

Now is 350 pages of my heart for the last 22 years, from the earliest time when I could consider myself halfway decent at making English work for its dinner. It's in somewhat rough form, as my heart always has been, in only a basic order, without illustrations or an introduction or any of that Good Book Stuff. It's in PDF form for that reason. Mobi and ePub will come eventually, but for now, it's just for us. So please don't pirate it or share it around with anyone who isn't a patron here. This one is just for family.

This isn't really a book. This isn't really a book launch day. It is? But it isn't. It's just the words. And what power they may have. But it's all for you.

Thank you for my life. That is not an exaggeration. Thank you for my life. Without you, I would have had to quit writing after my divorce. Everything I've written since 2017, you are part of, you made happen, you deserve some of the credit for. Thank you for letting me keep writing what I love, thank you for helping me raise a child, thank you for making it possible for me to continue being a writer.

I love you all so much, and I will never cease to squeeze your hands when we meet in person. You are wonders. Thank you so much.

I hope you enjoy this. It's basically just twenty years of my soul, sliced up into columns and slipped under your door.

What the Dragon Said: The Collected Poems of Catherynne M. Valente 1999-2021

*Enormous thanks to Chanie Beckman, my assistant, who did the gargantuan work of assembling this beast and telling it not to light the curtains on fire. Repeatedly.