Winner of the Driftwood Editors’ Pick Poetry Prize

Cate McGowan’s debut poetry collection, Sacrificial Steel uses art, history, and complex, musical poetic lines and forms to explore the biggest question we have as humans: What does it all mean?

Sacrificial Steel is a collection forged from the heat of art, history, and the unruly churn of contemporary life. These poems investigate how we weather the world: the bargains we strike, the bodies and landscapes we lean on, the fragile scaffolding that keeps us upright. The title borrows its name from an industrial process in which one metal corrodes to shield another–an image that threads through poems of marriage, inheritance, ecological strain, and political unease.

Rooted in McGowan’s deep relationship with visual art, the book moves through museums, ruins, marshes, southern coastlines, and domestic interiors. Ekphrasis becomes a portal rather than a mirror. Formal agility–pantoums, centos, hybrid forms, and unexpected braids–creates a soundscape that shifts from incantatory to intimate.

What emerges is a study of how we endure. The poems probe identity, grief, and the daily negotiations that shape the self, while also opening out to the fractures of American culture. Sacrificial Steel, winner of the Driftwood Press Editors’ Pick Prize, offers a charged, vivid meditation on the things we build and the costs we carry.

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Praise for
SACRIFICIAL STEEL

A wonderful addition to contemporary poetry, Cate McGowan’s Sacrificial Steel cuts lyric vision with punk swagger and mordant humor to examine womanhood, history, family, ecological disaster, and Southern identity. I am gobsmacked by the precision and restraint that characterize these impeccable poems—every syllable, every character, every space. Like her contemporaries, feminist poets Cynthia Cruz and Aracelis Girmay, McGowan possesses a fine intelligence that is matched only by her conscience. These poems affirm that it is now, as it has been, the poet’s work to “clock the universe’s massacres, dark / soffits, underhanded sky.”—Carolyn Hembree, author of For Today

Sacrificial Steel is a stunning debut collection, bright as a lighthouse flashing into the dark. These poems hide from nothing, illuminating truths about both the vicious and beautiful possibilities of our world. They embody the sublime and are breathtaking in their precise candor.—Erica Wright, author of All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned

Sacrificial Steel is as much a song of grief as it is ekphrasis of the art of survival. Steered by a guiding belief in the poet’s role as musician and artist, Cate McGowan’s debut collection dexterously navigates a range of human experience—from the specter of death in one girl’s family to the ravages of our collective human impact on the natural world. On every page, McGowan witnesses the mixed bag of who we are—loving and leaving, violent and tender: “We’re corpuscles and kidneys, sweat and shit and spit,/ admixtures, fragile parts in fancy wrappings”—and calls us to resist the “magnetism of demise.” “Nothing’s discouraged me,” the poet says. “I shouldn’t exist, yet I’m here.” Read this one slowly. Savor its music.—Cynthia Marie Hoffman, author of Exploding Head

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