Happy December! Gunpowder is thrilled to be releasing the first Barry Spacks Poetry Prize winner: Catherine Abbey Hodges’ Instead of Sadness.
In Catherine Abbey Hodges’ Instead of Sadness the beauty is there as the bread of life, as the poems enter and grow in us—the kind of experience we come to expect in good poems—the feeling of “Ah yes, that’s right”…. They effect their changes in us subtly and steadily, convincing us that their perceptions and discoveries are our own—which, when we have given them our full attention, is exactly right.
—Dan Gerber, author of Sailing through Cassiopeia
Catherine Abbey Hodges’ Instead of Sadness is a book to savor. One can’t rush through these poems; they’re not built for speed.… Calm and meditative, lyrical, structured more by the shift of images than by events, her poems carry a human and spiritual resonance of what is “signed and wondrous” long after they close.
—Peter Everwine , author of Listening Long and Late
Catherine Abbey Hodges offers us—inside each musical line, within each vibrant trope—a luminous wisdom. Each poem gives us a world “replenished like a well // in blues and greens and wings.” That her poems are alive and making their way in our world is cause for much grateful celebration.
—Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emeritus