Poets Square - A Memoir in Thirty Cats

An intimate memoir about the importance of community and care in a world that can feel impossibly broken—and a story about accidentally going viral while tending to a colony of feral cats. When Courtney Gustafson moved into a rental house in the Poets Square neighborhood of Tucson, Arizona, she didn’t know that the property came with thirty feral cats. Focused only on her own survival—in a new relationship, during a pandemic, with poor mental health and a job that didn’t pay enough—Courtney was reluctant to spend any of her own time or money caring for the wayward animals. But the cats—their pleading eyes, their ribs showing, the new kittens born in the driveway—didn’t give her a choice. She had no idea about the grief and hardship of animal rescue, the staggering size of the problem in neighborhoods across the country. And she couldn’t have imagined how that struggle—toward an ethics of care, of individuals trying their best amid spectacularly failing systems—would help pierce a personal darkness she’d wrestled with for much of her life.