A poetic meditation on the terror of extinction. The Woman with a Cat on Her Shoulder is a gathering of "punk formalist" lyrics that collectively are a meditation not on mortality so much as on the terror of extinction, how that terror is the reservoir of love. Katrovas declaims from the margins of faith, the cliff edge of doubt, seeking to measure the conductivity of private troubles to public issues. Katrovas' "riffs" are verse essays jotted in the antechambers of nightmares and erotic dreams.