BLESSED NOWHERE
WINNER, GUERNICA EDITIONS PRIZE FOR LITERARY FICTION
It’s the late nineties, a time when it is still possible to disappear, and Abby is at an impasse between self-destruction and dissolution. Just months after the death of her son, in a last-ditch effort to escape her reality, Abby buys a $500 car, tucks a buck knife in her glove box, and makes one impulsive move: she takes an exit south and keeps driving. It’s in a small town in central Mexico that Abby’s physical journey comes to an end, and it’s there amongst other outcasts and expats that Abby might finally choose to see beyond her own grief.
Praise for Blessed Nowhere
This is a novel rich with life and empathy in a sea of grief. One of the most beautiful books I have read. — Nazanine Hozar, author of Aria, a Globe and Mail bestseller
A good writer will make you feel, a master writer will make you feel things for the first time. Blessed Nowhere is a story of love and impossible grief but also of hope that transcends. It’s a haunting book that holds you gently as it whispers and weeps right into your soul while you turn its pages, unable to stop listening. — Jowita Bydlowska, author of Monster
Buy the book: https://www.amazon.ca/Blessed-Nowhere-Catherine-Black/dp/1771839112
BEWILDERNESS
PAT LOWTHER AWARD-NOMINATED
Prose Poetry
Bewilderness explores urban and suburban wildernesses—threshold places—in a darkly comedic, surreal collection of prose poems. In Bewilderness, urban and suburban landscapes come to life as shape-shifting places of magical thinking, as the reader explores the heterotopias of playgrounds and backyards, lakefront parks, splintery subdivisions, attics, auction houses, and semi-industrial wastelands. Creatures that inhabit these edged-out corners take on the features and neuroses of their human co-habitants in poems with offbeat instructions for navigating and inhabiting these liminal worlds. Nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.
Praise for Bewilderness:
From the natural world to the liminal space between dream and hard reality, Catherine Black reveals the strange and beautiful in these leaping image prose poems. I was uplifted by this collection: it is both shelter and nourishment.
—Carolyn Smart, author of Careen
In Bewilderness, each item in the notebook of everything is connected by an invisible thread to each other thing. Catherine Black weaves her poems with these threads, connecting the luminosity, resonance and being of the everyday, its complex web of perceptions and emotions with evocative sensory and conceptual allure. We are “bewildered” in that everything, even the familiar, is newly discovered, wild to possibility, observation and poetry. As this book reads our world, we read this book: with eyes wild open.
—Gary Barwin, author of Yiddish for Pirates
Review of Bewilderness in Anomaly: https://medium.com/anomalyblog/on-bewilderness-by-catherine-black-ead48e900f12
Buy the book: https://www.amazon.ca/Bewilderness-Catherine-Black/dp/1771833998
A HARD GOLD THREAD
RELIT NOMINATED
Experimental Memoir
In this, her second book, Catherine Black weaves together the wonder, heartache, and “unlovely beauty” of a youth that is by turns charmed and disquieting. Straddling genres of memoir, prose, and poetry, A Hard Gold Thread delights in the layering of keenly observed moments, in the subtle play of remembering and forgetting, and in the shift in perspective brought to bear on memory as it is transmuted by time. Reverent, sensitively rendered, and sometimes tongue in cheek, A Hard Gold Thread is an unconventional memoir inviting the reader into a meditation on the engulfing beauty of the world and the compulsion to turn away from it.
Buy the book:https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Gold-Thread-First-Fictions-ebook/dp/B00DELGURO
LESSONS OF CHAOS AND DISASTER
Prose Poetry
A stunning collection of poems, these works explore moments of empathy in suffering, epiphany in ruin, and grace in surrender. In chronicling a journey from childhood grief through the dark rapture of love and longing, these translucent poems unveil vulnerability, uncertainty, and movement into the half-light of a new beginning.
Praise for Black’s first book, Lessons of Chaos and Disaster: Her work in this debut collection is intense, imagistic and often inward looking. Black tends to write in direct, declarative sentences, but she achieves an incantatory urgency through repetition and a build-up of expressive images.
—Barbara Carey, Toronto Star
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