"In 'Love Poem to the Phrase Let's Get Coffee, ' Catherine Pierce writes 'I adore your elegant manner, one hand on the car door, the other on the ass.' She writes with her own tricky elegance, one that acknowledges yet adores language's self-serving grace. Pierce deftly blends repetition with sophisticated syntax, and a sinister wit glows inside the emotional wisdom of her vision. Animals of Habit is an exhilarating book."--Andrew Hudgins "If I didn't know the poet personally, I'd think the name Catherine Pierce was a pseudonym, for these poems are not merely edgy, they are razor-sharp-they...

At the heart of acclaimed poet Catherine Pierce's much-anticipated third book, a powerful tornado churns, spinning out poems of disaster and love, of sirens and wrecked landscapes, of warnings heeded and not. These poems stare down fear from the inside, and ask what it means to walk straight into a splintering world both profane and sacred.