CAT LOVE

A near-future dystopian novel narrated by a cat who finds herself imprisoned in a Schrodinger's box at the center of an emotional statistics course.

I wonder if they can hear me? If only they could, I might have a chance at convincing one of them to let me out. A long time ago, the first cat to wander into the cave of a human and make itself at home, learned how to meow in the same frequency as human babies. Not surprisingly, since that first cat chirped, humans haven't been able to resist stroking our fur and sharing their food with us and letting us snuggle in their beds. Knowing how to hijack the nurturing instinct of humans is not genetic though. It's a skill taught from one cat to another.

CAT LOVE takes place in a near-future dystopia in which empathy has essentially been both weaponized and monetized. At the heart of the story is our beloved narrator, a calico cat who has been kidnapped and imprisoned in a box. While students of the Emotional Statistics Course contemplate the fate of the cat (if it's even really in the box, they wonder) and evaluate their emotional reaction to it, the cat's spirit travels to discover what has happened to the people who put her in this predicament. Along the way we hear of the cat's previous lives and explore the relationships that are formed and broken along the way. With dashes of poetry and multiple-choice questions, CAT LOVE is an exceptional tale told through a poet's lyrical lens.

Tomás Q. Morín is the author of several books, including the memoir Let Me Count the Ways (Nebraska, 2022), winner of the 2022 Writers' League of Texas Nonfiction Book Award; the poetry collections Machete, A Larger Country, and Patient Zero; and other books. He is on the faculty at Rice University.
https://www.tomasqmorin.com