If the Water

by Cathy Cain

In If the Water, Cathy Cain steers a flotilla of fantasies and meditations that, with her big heart and playful verbal dexterity, become lifeboats of connection as we navigate the strange, amorphous, and often anxious seas of being. 

Early Praise

Cathy Cain’s new poetry collection If the Water is not just a great delight, it is a book of delights:  a book of play, a book of thought, a book that speaks the truth of love and sadness.  Throughout these vivid poems, Cain is powerfully aware of the many seas of being and welcomes the reader on the journey with a rare and generous hand.

—Annie Lighthart, author of Pax

The poems in Cathy Cain’s If the Water deftly take the reader on a journey with imagery that returns us again and again to water. Whether about a miscarriage, the love of a spouse, or the horror of refugees on a sinking boat, these poems take us back to our common womb—the sea. In a world of watery light, waves and tides, Cain’s beautiful poems reflect back to us our own sorrows and joys, leaving us all with a better understanding that we are all leaf shimmer and silver turning/a wild multitude of small tremblings/a simmering sea.

—Carey Taylor, author of Some Aid to Navigation

If the Water by Cathy Cain is about making one’s way in the world, to borrow Annie Lighthart’s phrase, in the fragile craft of one’s body. These poems flow through the intermingled waters of literature and art, myth and truth, reality and the imagination. Even Peter Pan and his flying ship steer the reader for part of the journey. Metaphors involving water abound in sensational and surprising turns—a library likened to “an aquarium    or a cross section of the open sea.” Cain’s language pulses with musical rhythms, and each poem is deftly accomplished by intuitive forms. After turning the last page of this haunting, sparkling collection, the breadth—childhood, motherhood, love, self-reflection—and most of all the grace of Cain’s poetry abides.

—Lana Hechtman Ayers, author of The Autobiography of Rain

 

About the Author

Cathy Cain is the author of four previous books of poetry: Lamplight, The Weight of Clouds, A Shape of Sky, and Bee Dance (The Poetry Box). She has also published two chapbooks: Love’s Press (The Poetry Box) and Empty Space Places You (Finishing Line Press).

Cain’s honors include the Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry, the Paulann Petersen Award for Poetry from Willamette Writers, a Pushcart Prize nomination, a PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection nomination, 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.

A visual artist and the mother of two fine sons, Cathy Cain taught in the public schools for over thirty years. She lives with her husband near Portland, Oregon.

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Love’s Press

by Cathy Cain

Love’s Press is a handful of lighthearted love poems about the joys and romance of a long marriage, a playful outpouring of love and affection for a husband. Hopefully, there are many others in the world as lucky as Cathy Cain demonstrates in these poems.

Enjoy a video of Sandra reading from her new book:

Early Praise:

Love’s Press, by Cathy Cain, is a deeply personal, wonderfully sensual, and infinitely relatable  testament to love— if you’ve been so fortunate to love and be loved for the better part of a lifetime. Cain’s poetry weaves lyrical details of morning twilight sky, constellations and gravity, the “empty space that’s receptive to your touch,” with more down to earth details, such as long johns and beach chairs. “Hold on,” she implores, “as we speed / through night’s dark discordant din.” Hold on, indeed! After reading Love’s Press, you will want to slide down the couch to your love, curling in for a cuddle, or as Cain puts it, “schooning alongside as one.”

—Ann Farley, author of Tell Her Yes

With these twenty-two poems, Cathy Cain creates a song of praise for a long marriage to a beloved husband. In one poem, his presence floods through her as mysteriously yet vividly “as light unseen.” In another she maintains that he gives off “a shy light made more visible” by her “mortal dust.” In yet another, his body is a sun, the very “shape of warmth.” Be it unseen or shy or powerfully bright, the light he brings to her life illuminates each poem. This collection is a tribute to deep and sustaining love.

—Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

 

About the Author

Poet and artist Cathy Cain is the author of Lamplight, The Weight of Clouds, A Shape of Sky, and Bee Dance, published by The Poetry Box press; and a chapbook, Empty Space Places You, published by Finishing Line Press.

Cain’s honors include the Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry, the Paulann Petersen Award for Poetry from Willamette Writers, a Pushcart nomination, a PEN/Voelcker nomination, 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.

The mother of two fine sons, Cain taught in the public schools for over thirty-two years. She lives with her husband near Portland, Oregon.

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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.

The post Lamplight appeared first on The Poetry Box.

by Cathy Cain

Cathy Cain, like a bee to flower, gathers thought from one encounter with nature to another. She speaks from many perspectives — as herself, as tree, as mushroom, or as goddess-hero. Sometimes playful, even mystical, Cain is deeply honest as she confronts the state of our relationship with the natural environment, with technology, and with what it means to be human.

About the Author

Poet and artist Cathy Cain​’s honors include the Kay Snow Paulann Petersen Award for Poetry​ ​and the Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry. ​She is the author of Empty Space Places You (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her poetry has appeared in Reed Magazine, VoiceCatcher, The Poeming Pigeon, and Verseweavers.

Cain holds degrees in literature and visual art from Lewis & Clark College, MAT; Oregon State University, BFA; and University of Washington, BA, Phi Beta Kappa. She has studied at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters, and with Portland’s Mountain Writers Series.

The mother of two sons, Cain taught in the public schools for over thirty years. She lives with her husband near Portland, Oregon.

What They’re Saying…

Thrumming with a wise and generous curiosity, the poems in Cathy Cain’s Bee Dance are bright signposts pointing a way forward through a difficult age. Whether about lichen, lava, or driving through a long tunnel, Cain’s poems show us the pleasure of pattern and the possibility of imagination, of living with both grace and alarm. This book beautifully does poetry’s steadfast work of naming and knowing the lives all around us. Here, the natural world meets the human over rich, porous boundaries: trees speak of long affection, stones quiet the mind, brushed hair sends off shooting stars. The poems in Bee Dance are blessings for the reader, as Cain’s poem “Small Blessings” states so well: “One for each of us / so we know we’re not alone.”

— Annie Lighthart, author of Lantern and Iron String

The energetic dance of bees at the hive focuses on describing a roadmap to abundance. Cathy Cain’s poems in Bee Dance explore expanses of a world filled with animal and vegetative creatures. She describes the wordless comfort of holding a rock while acknowledging the spirit spaces between words. Her poetry expresses the impulse to reinvent ourselves outside of cyber noise and instead define ourselves within the boundaries of sentiencies around us. Her poems suggest trail guides through the perils of today’s world that threaten lichens and suffocate us with plastics, moving us to landscapes of morning mist that say yes! and reveal honey in the communal hive.

— Tricia Knoll, author of How I Learned to be White
and Broadfork Farm

Book Launch Readings:

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