Pella Felton Reviews Streetlamp Nautilus by Catharine Batsios
Batsios, Catharine (2025). Streetlamp Nautilus (Poetry Collection) Luchador Press 98p. $13.00 (Paperback)
By the time the I made my way through the first page of Streetlamp Nautilus, I’d witnessed an aneurysm at a local diner, a bullet hole in the glass, and a long line of Buicks. By the time I moved to the second page, those Buicks had already taken over the night, immersing me in their lovingly rendered, almost eroticized shark-like build and spitting me out a few pages later, on the corner of Prentis & Second.
It is nighttime, my eyes cannot adjust to the neon, and I have no idea where I am.
Streetlamp Nautilus is the haunting, intoxicating, and relentlessly readable debut poetry collection from Flint, Michigan native Catharine Batsios. The 98-page volume is one of many fantastic volumes recently released from Luchador Press, which chronicle the compact and tightly wound afterlife of a Middle America in decline. Centering on the landscape of Flint and Metro Detroit, the poems in this collection document a carnival of places, personalities, and moments from an urban landscape asserting its survival from varying levels of precariousness and sobriety.
What sets Streetlamp Nautilus apart from so many other documents of the Rust Belt decay is a dedication to the kinetic, tactile, and sometimes empathic immediacy of its subjects. Batsios’ poems embody the fast-paced energy of a Detroitland on the edge. However, this immediacy is implemented with an insouciant agency that resists the predatory gaze of rubberneckers. Poems like “Street Food/Requiem Shark” begin in mid-thought, with enjambment and stanza breaks that evoke a fluid landscape less notable for its definition than for the bright and chaotic shine reflected at the reader in the rearview mirror.
I found the effect hypnotic and dizzying; images blur together faster than they can be processed. Verses move through the lanes of traffic so quickly that it often took me several trips around the block to grasp the flow of traffic fully. It always feels like I’ve arrived at the poem after it has begun, becoming a witness to the aftermath. Still, Batsios’ inventive, often chaotic verse cruises its way down block after block, only pausing to note an old diner, a favorite lover from a past era, or “the delicate metals adorning that Flint smell.”
Batsios luxuriates in these ‘delicate metals.’ Her descriptions of fire escapes, Buick assembly lines, and sedan bodies represent some of the most lovingly rendered images in the collection. We seem to know so much more about the cars on the road than the mysterious lover with whom she shares a cup of coffee in “What We Found In Those Nights.” Inversely, Batsios reveals an unbridled contempt for more classic pastoral imagery. In “Michigan Girl,” she satirizes the commercialized poeticism of “Pure Michigan,” unleashing all her venom on “some white girl at a bonfire wearing an oversized sweater” who “looks wistfully at the firespark rising into starscape.” Poems range in tone from these sharply satirical verses to the hilariously self-deprecating stanzas of “Five Nights A Week,” where an inebriated lounge singer describes herself as “self-aware/making a point with a slurred speech about Modern Feminism/While I stagger the same three feet in my blue jeans and bra.”
Other poems reveal grander ambitions. In “Photo Albums of the Old Greeks were Roasted Peppers” and “At the Restaurant, Sisyphus, Atlas, Prometheus,” Batsios expertly blends quotidian and epic imagery, alluding to classical tragedy and the olfactory pleasures of Greek cuisine with equal glee and importance. The lofty metaphorical reach of the latter gives a heroic, almost ironic scale to the labor of Yaya’s Greek restaurant employees. This milieu recurs through much of the middle section of the book, providing a thorough survey of the lives of the servers, kitchen staff and patrons of Baba’s. The most compelling of these is also the simplest. “Eggs/Potatoes/Toast” presents a short and sweet remembrance of the beloved restaurateur who taught the narrator to “dip soak with Toast/ the yolk starts open.”
The breadth of this collection’s scale and velocity invited me to revisit numerous times. Catharine Batsios has provided a window into a busy Michigan night that feels neither voyeuristic nor participatory. At its best moments, the book feels like “Richard Scary’s Busytown” for drunk people. Living somewhere between Studs Turkel and John Rechy, Streetlamp Nautilus is an ode to the moments and memories made of a lifetime of watching a city, told with the speed and density of someone who understands the geography by heart, yet still loves being lost there after dark.
Steetlamp Nautilus is available now through most online booksellers.
Pella Felton is a poet, performer, and independent scholar stationed out of Northwest Ohio. She holds a certificate in Performance Studies from Bowling Green University and has performed her work at various poetry festivals and events throughout the Midwest including the Toledo Fringe Festival, BGSU Winter Wheat Literary Festival, and the Literary Underground Festival. She is also an accomplished media and performance scholar who frequently presents her research at conferences such as the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, The Great Lakes Association of Sound Studies, and the Society for Media and Cinema Studies. Pella lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.
