Description

Lamplight

by Cathy Cain

Sometimes the weight rises and the telling wells up to be heard.

 

Early Praise for Lamplight:

Cathy Cain’s Lamplight explores what lights the darkest nights and how dark those nights can be. She writes to “wear down in poem the pointed pain.” Cain, an artist (as well as poet) who works in several media, offers dramatic images to pitch opposites against each other. We find sparkling songs and savage blues, lamplight and dark. Her lyric poetry balances shadows of grief and time. Narrative poems, with touches of surrealism, explore loss, illness, and madness. She offers lights in a hospital window across a courtyard as relief.  Cain plumbs the quicksand of current geo-politics. Concluding poems offer comfort in the lush color of daybreak. Her poems come home to gratitude in a morning walk, the smell of forgiveness in clean laundry.  She invites the sky in at dawn.

—Tricia Knoll, author of The Unknown Daughter and Wild Apples

Lamplight is both opening and closing. Like any journey-woman on a quest to understand grief, Cathy Cain finds not truth so much as renewal. These poems are like compact, inescapable dreams, bruised with switchbacks that “shift / over the edge,” where misery becomes a glow, a shine, and, finally, a blaze of love.

—David Biespiel, author of Republic Café

Cathy Cain’s poems move through lamplit rooms and find everything we’ve left there, everything we’ve hidden. The poems in Lamplight bring the world out of silhouette and into the lived-in body. They help us see the treachery and loveliness living within us, and show us where to go. This collection is beautifully written and powerful.

—Jules Ohman, author of Body Grammar

About the Author

Poet and artist Cathy Cain is the author of The Weight of Clouds (2022); A Shape of Sky (2021), and Bee Dance (2019), all from The Poetry Box Press. She’s additionally published a chapbook, Empty Space Places You (2018) from Finishing Line Press.

Cain’s honors include the Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry, the Paulann Petersen Award for Poetry from Willamette Writers, and a First Place and other citations from the Oregon Poetry Association. Her poetry has appeared in Reed Magazine, The Poeming Pigeon, Verseweavers, VoiceCatcher, and in /pãn| dé | mïk/ 2020: An Anthology of Pandemic Poems. She is a two-year Poets Studio alumna and an Atheneum Fellow, both at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters in Portland, Oregon. She holds degrees in literature and visual art from Lewis & Clark College, MAT; Oregon State University, BFA; and University of Washington, BA, Phi Beta Kappa.

Cain taught in the public schools for over thirty years. She lives with her husband near Portland.