Poetry. Weatherhead's CATS AND DOGS features plain-spoken, tragicomic koans for the 21st century. Voiced by a solitary city-dweller, these poems borrow haiku's small, startling observations, but with an eye for metropolitan life: its bus rides and apartment building rooftops. By turns graceful and artfully clumsy, Weatherhead's lines find their way to an honesty I enjoy and admire. Perhaps his gift for understatement is contagious; I want to tap poetry readers on the shoulder and say Listen--this book--you might want to take it home when what I mean is Read this immediately.--Heather Christle

I've long thought of Weatherhead as one of my favorite writer's writer's writers, which by that I mean I love the way he sees the world. Through an array of styles and tones that together tread that nebulously majestic area between imagination and emotion, humor and reflection, fact and hope, CATS AND DOGS bears evidence of a voice that came prepared for anything, and one that makes the world more bearable by simply knowing it exists.--Blake Butler

These are beautiful poems because they're true. Andrew James Weatherhead writes poems that mock, exalt, and describe, sometimes all in the same poem--they take amazing leaps, but you never feel that the ground has shifted under your feet. His voice very calmly tells you what you didn't think you needed to know.--Matthew Rohrer