Raft of Days

Gunpowder Press is excited to announce a second book from Catherine Abbey Hodges, Raft of Days.

There is a brilliant subtlety to this witnessing, a knowing tenderness that explores our relationships with the natural world and those we love. These poems exalt the moment and explore the geography of memory, with a spare clarity that evokes our finest lyric poets’ imaginations. Everything matters in Catherine Abbey Hodges’ world: temperature, math, violet, penny—she transforms the ordinary into art, into breathtaking poems that call to you again and again. This poet is a marvel. Raft of Days is a treasure.

          —Lee Herrick, author of Gardening Secrets of the Dead

Because she’s honed the art of looking inward and outward at the same time in Raft of Days, Catherine Abbey Hodges writes poems that manage to be small and also large, quiet while eventful, realistic yet reverent, both evocative and clear. She acknowledges the “dark sand and dark/stones on a dark morning,” but chooses to see the single crab shell that’s “bright as a poppy.” Her poetry produces more than pleasure. It is an antidote to despair.

–Susan Cohen, author of A Different Wakeful Animal

A unique voice is one thing; a true voice that pays close attention to the world is something else again.  Put them together and you have the exceptional yet eminently accessible poems of Raft of Days.  Catherine Abbey Hodges distills the rush of experience into clear and deeply human poems.  She has an appreciation for the spiritual glowing just inside the physical world.  This is an insightful yet modest poetry, a compassionate and original vision.

 —Christopher Buckley, author of Star Journal: Selected Poems

In her second collection of poems, Catherine Abbey Hodges seeks grace in the natural geometries of light-seamed clouds and evening skies, comfort in rain and birds and humble garden flowers. Her meditations are a way of marking time and mortality—her own and that of those she loves. Sorrow is balanced alongside wonder, and the complexities of faith huddle close to the ordinary work of cooking, making lists, and keeping a steady breath. This is an authentic and beautiful book.

      —Emma Trelles, author of Tropicalia