The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus

Catullus wrote what may be the most personal poetry in Western literature. In these 116 poems, he drags his readers into the wreckage of his love affair with the married Lesbia: the jealousy, the longing, the bitter betrayal, the obsessive return to every wound. He writes about sex with an honesty that shocked Rome and has lost none of its power to unsettle. He writes about friendship with a ferocity that bleeds into cruelty. These are not polished meditations on love; they are dispatches from the inside of obsession. The collection opens with poems to Lesbia's pet sparrow, playful and tender, then pivots to savagely funny attacks on political figures, and arrives finally at Poem 101, a grief so raw it has outlived two millennia. Len Krisak's translations capture this range: the obsessive lover, the poet who writes with a knife, the man who cannot stop feeling too much. Catullus left a mark on every poet who followed him, from Ovid to the present. If you want poetry that burns, that refuses to be safe, that shows you the inside of a man who could not help but tell the truth, this is it.