by Cathy Cain

Like prism light, Cathy Cain’s poems in A Shape of Sky reveal, in distinct colors, the predicament and magic of living in our bodies. Cain, a visual artist as well as a writer, illuminates complexity, beauty, and exuberant sensuousness wherever she directs her gaze. Whether she focuses on the work of artists like David Hockney, James Turrell, Kiki Smith, the process of making art, or merely the everyday, her poetry reminds us that an aesthetic view can sustain us with energy and hope.

About the Author

Poet and visual artist Cathy Cain is the author of Bee Dance (The Poetry Box, 2019) 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 First Place, Second Place, and Honorable Mentions from the Oregon Poetry Association. Her poetry has appeared in Reed Magazine, The Poeming Pigeon, Verseweavers, and VoiceCatcher.

Cain is a two-year Poet’s Studio alumna and a 2014-2015 Atheneum Fellow, both at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters. Additionally, she has studied with Portland’s Mountain Writers Series and with visiting poets through Literary Arts.

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 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 A Shape of Sky:

Cathy Cain’s poems are balanced between the light and darkness of what is said and unsaid, of what decays and what blossoms. Her wonderful book tends to the margins of existence with a steady eye. Time and again, the poems in A Shape of Sky are like maps to guide us through the transformations that can come from perspective, resilience, and wonder.

—David Biespiel, author of A Place of Exodus

What strikes me about [the poem] “Overlap” is how carefully it examines the seemingly mundane. The allusions are poignant while still leaving the objects and the tiny clashes between them to speak for themselves.

—David Perez, Poet Laureate Emeritus, Santa Clara County, CA, and author, Love in a Time of Robot Apocalypse

The experience of reading Cathy Cain’s A Shape of Sky is akin to walking through an art museum, if all the paintings were rendered in words. In language that is lyrical, sensual, and brave, Cain expertly braids experiences of the natural world, the body, the mythic and spiritual, and the creation and contemplation of art into poems that radiate both light and darkness. At times, the words themselves seemed to lift off the page and hover before me, illuminated. In this astonishing collection, Cain creates for the reader “a delicate descending/ from heavy dream into uncluttered light.”

—Brittney Corrigan, author of Daughters

ENJOY CATHY READING FROM HER NEW BOOK:

CATHY CAIN — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Jan 2021)

The post A Shape of Sky appeared first on The Poetry Box.

A Miscellany

by Michael Estabrook

A delightful miscellany of poems on a multitude of subjects in various forms and genres including: ancestral portraits, bestiary, commonplace, complaints, catalogs, concrete, dialog, dreams, ekphrastic, erotica, experimental, found poems, free verse, light poems, imagistic, list poems, lyrical, military, monolog, narrative, nostalgia, object poems, odes, pentastichs, persona poems, philias, phobias, philosophies, portraits, prose poems, romantic, satire, sonnets, stream-of-consciousness, triptychs, work . . .

“The Poet’s Curse”

Everything the poet sees
or hears, thinks, feels or imagines
gets captured, interpreted and shoe-horned
into a damn poem
whether they like it or not.

About the Author

Educated first in the sciences, graduating into comparative literature and languages, Michael Estabrook is a recently retired baby boomer child-of-the-sixties poet freed finally after working 40 years for “The Man” and sometimes “The Woman.” No more useless meetings under florescent lights in stuffy stale windowless rooms.

Instead, he is able to concentrate on making better poems and on pursuing other interests including: art, music, theatre, opera, history, genealogy, philosophy, and his wife, who has always been the most beautiful woman he has ever known.

Since the late 1980s, Michael has published over 20 collections, including most recently: Bouncy House, edited by Larry Fagin (Green Zone Editions, 2014); Two Sides of the Same Coin, drawings by Wayne Hogan (little books press, 2016); It Is What It Is, with Phil Weidman, drawings by Wayne Hogan (little books press, 2018).

Hopefully with each passing decade the poems have become more universal in nature: clear and concise, succinct and precise, more thought-provoking and relatable.

What They’re Saying…

Michael Estabrook’s The Poet’s Curse is a must-read collection by a particularly perceptive observer of our often-cockeyed world. Each of his poems repeats and enlarges upon the flavor of his brief jewel “because of the encumbrance of material things”: rusting stove at curbside being/thrown away by the inhabitants/of an old dilapidated shack/in back and I think that all/of us should remember/to throw-out our old stoves. Read Estabrook’s The Poet’s Curse knowing you’re reading real poetry.

~ Wayne Hogan, Poet &Artist

What’s become increasingly clear to anyone paying careful attention over these past few decades is that Estabrook is a master jeweler and that each day, each moment, of his life is a small, glittering stone waiting to be shaped into something iridescent and precious. These poems are the minutiae of a life well lived and well loved – each one is a gem that shines with a vital, stunning clarity.

~ John Sweet, Poet

I have been reading Michael Estabrook for the full twenty years that I’ve been engaged with the small press, and never tire of his humorous, often self-deprecating, yet poignant poetry. This full-length book is long overdue, and is a just reward for a consistently wonderful poet.

~ Glenn Cooper, Poet & Collagist

The post The Poet’s Curse appeared first on The Poetry Box.