Announcing Catherine's Other

Friends, I'm very pleased to announce that my good friend Catherine Pritchard Childress has a poetry chapbook titled Other coming out soon from Finishing Line Press. You may recall Catherine as the poet who produced a poem a day with me during April 2012. (Click here to see those NaPoWriMo posts.) About Catherine's Other chapbook Jesse Graves (Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine) said, "The poems in Other move seamlessly between worlds, invested in the biblical and the contemporary, the mythical and the uncomfortably real. . . . Essentially, this is a book of enchantments." Don Johnson (Here and Gone) wrote about Catherine's writing: "as her characterizations of biblical women cut through our received notions of their roles and destinies to construct other women who defy easy categorizations, so do the 'personal' poems resist the easy labeling of confessional." About the themes of this collection Linda Parsons Marion (Bound) said, "Other teaches and tempts us with guerrilla knowledge of the female experience." If the proof is in the pudding, as the old adage says, the proof here would be in the poetry. Here is one of the poems in Other. I hope you enjoy its "guerrilla knowledge." Wedding Vows When she stood before God and all those witnesses to say I Do What she really meant was I Don’t. I Won’t. She meant You’ve got to be kidding me. Who wants to spend the rest of her life with some poor, old, sick guy? What she meant is I don’t intend to wash your clothes or wear lipstick any more. I won’t walk barefoot in your kitchen. I promise to gain at least twenty pounds, to honor my Daddy’s name, And to obey a plethora of self-help books. She could have meant I Do. I do have a mind of my own, my own life, friends, musical taste. I do know how to order take out and maintain separate accounts. She meant with this ring I will have a headache, often! I will leave the lights on at night so I can read. I will breathe down your neck, and in your face with morning breath. I will forsake shaving my legs from the knee up Until Death Do Us Part. —Catherine Pritchard Childress, Other (forthcoming 2015) Besides sharing her poems in this blog during NaPoWriMo 2012, I have also had the great pleasure and privilege of publishing Catherine's poetry in the North American Review: her poem "Hush" in the Summer 2012 issue. Catherine has also appeared twice in the North American Review blog: her interview of Charlotte Pence (November 2013) and her Next Big Thing Interview (April 2013). That last item would be very interesting to look at now since it concerns the Other collection. Catherine Pritchard Childress lives in the Appalachian Mountains of East Tennessee and teaches at East Tennessee State University and Northeast State Community College. I hope I've enticed you enough to pre-order Other by Catherine Pritchard Childress. Click here to reserve a copy from Finishing Line Press. Won't you comment, please, friends? To make a comment, look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. If you don't see that, look in the red line that starts Posted by Vince, then find the word comments and click it once. Ingat, everyone.   ヅ