Description

The Weight of Clouds

by Cathy Cain

maybe…let the clouds be in charge / since they are

The Weight of Clouds is an intimate celebration of how our spirit is surprised and enlarged at the moment of perception, when the weight of reality is balanced by that of our imagination.

Cathy Cain’s words, phrases, and images dissipate, then reemerge like shifting cloud formations. She observes the openings where mystery flows through us like a luminous current. Even as Cain quietly addresses the impermanence of our bodies, she focuses on the amazement, the near impossibility, of our existence and the wonder of love. Her poems are a reflection on how we create the beauty that we need to survive.

ENJOY A VIDEO OF CATHY READING FROM THE BOOK:

Cathy Cain — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (August 2022)

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About the Author

Poet and artist Cathy Cain is the author of A Shape of Sky (2021) and Bee Dance (2019), both from The Poetry Box; and Empty Space Places You (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her honors include the Kay Snow Paulann Petersen Award for Poetry; the Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry; and a First Place from the Oregon Poetry Association poetry contest. 

Cain’s poetry has appeared in The Poeming Pigeon, Reed Magazine, Verseweavers, VoiceCatcher, and in  /pãn| dé | mïk/ 2020: An Anthology of Pandemic Poems.

Cain taught in the public schools for over thirty years. She is the lucky wife of a sweet man, and the mother of two fine sons. She lives with her husband near Portland, Oregon.

Early Praise for The Weight of Clouds:

Though heavy with memories, Cathy Cain’s poems are informed by the emissaries of weightlessness, especially angels. She has spent a lot of time looking up. Flight, sky, dreams, and clouds, of course, are all described with her painter’s eye. Dedicated to a sister and their shared families, this book is both a passionate and compassionate experience. As her inquiries and intimacies suggest, she has also spent a lot of time looking in, revealing, as she says “a tenderness about our mortality.”

—Allan Peterson, author of This Luminous, Precarious, and Fragile Acts