Larvae of the Nearest Stars - (Sea Cliff Fund) by Catherine W Carter (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Larvae of the Nearest Stars offers deeply serious verse that packs profound emotional and spiritual power while encouraging readers to laugh out loud. Catherine W. Carter's quirky, accessible poems bridge and question binaries--human and nonhuman, lyric and narrative, science and magic, river trash and galaxies. The poems' subjects range from dowsers and liver spots to the mysteries of two-seater outhouses and encounters with sentient milk jugs and "our lady of the bagels." The collection begins and ends by confronting the necessity--and the promise--to bear witness to the world as it is, addressing how we can manage to love the world in the face of everything that makes doing so a challenge. The poems in this engaging and meditative collection are sometimes dark, often funny, but always surprising.

Review Quotes

Catherine Carter's poems are Big Dipper fishhooks. Enter unguarded a subject such as a hornets' nest, an outhouse, a Sunday afternoon, and then--something else happens, or becomes visible. "This is us," it turns out, "mortal minerals in the brief era of stars, this is it.--Sarah Lindsay, author of Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower

I've been an admirer of Catherine Carter's poetry for over a decade, but this collection achieves a whole new level with its craft, vision, and urgency. Larvae of the Nearest Stars makes clear that she is one of our country's finest poets, and her book deserves a place on the same shelf as collections by Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry. 'I will not cease telling, ' Carter tells us in the final poem. May it long be so.--Ron Rash, PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and New York Times-bestselling author of Serena

About the Author

Catherine W. Carter is the author of The Memory of Gills and The Swamp Monster at Home. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Orion, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband in Cullowhee, North Carolina, where she teaches at Western Carolina University.