Three of my four books of poetry have appeared with Louisiana State University Press, and the fourth, a chapbook, with Jacar press. I encourage you to purchase books through your local independent bookseller, or click on the cover below to purchase from my local bookseller – City Lights Books, in Sylva NC, where signed copies are often available.
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 in this engaging and meditative collection are sometimes dark, often funny, but always surprising.
2019, LSU Press | 72 pages | ISBN: 9780807169889
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“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.”
–RON RASH, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SERENA AND THE COVE AND TWO-TIME RECIPIENT OF THE O. HENRY PRIZE
Marks of the Witch is the 2019 Jacar Press Chapbook Contest winner.
“Call it enchantment or call it witchery, the poetry in Carter’s Marks of the Witch creates through its incantatory rhythms and startling imagery a voice that reveals nothing less than the mystery residing in even the most ordinary detail of our daily lives.”
— Kathryn Stripling Byer
2014, Jacar Press | 23 pages | ISBN: 9780989795265
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“The Swamp Monster at Home is a most valuable collection of poems. Catherine Carter treats the sometimes scary materials she addresses with poise and wit, humor and frankness. Her self-possession is not armor plate; she is as vulnerable as you and I, as the deer that come to drink at the darkest river. She speaks with the kind of grace that is gained only after facing daunting difficulties with resolute courage. I admire everything about this book. Everything.”
—FRED CHAPPELL, NORTH CAROLINA POET LAUREATE (EMERITUS)
In Catherine Carter’s The Swamp Monster at Home, classical sirens sing from a Chesapeake Bay island; Adam and his lover, Steve, share beers in Eden; and a Norse goddess strides into an emergency room, “glowing like grain.” With quirky imagination and wry humor, Carter exposes the connections between human and nonhuman, blood and home. These vivid and tender poems consider the immanent and sometimes animistic natural world. The Swamp Monster at Home, however, takes new risks, offering a deeper vulnerability and greater maturity; this new collection acknowledges the loves within and outside of marriage and confesses to both the grief and relief of miscarriage.
- Nominated by LSU Press for Pulitzer Prize
- On Poetry Foundation’s list of best-selling poetry collections, March 2012
2012, LSU Press | 68 pages | ISBN: 9780807142806
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“The Memory of Gills is altogether an astonishing, seductive, and finally irresistible book of poems. Carter is a skillful, imaginative, and witty visionary. Here is a poet who hears the voices of the sensate world calling, pleading, cajoling . . . and her poems say what she knows with zest and inventiveness that no reader will soon forget.”
– KATHRYN STRIPLING BYER, NORTH CAROLINA POET LAUREATE (EMERITA) AND RECIPIENT OF THE NORTH CAROLINA AWARD IN LITERATURE
The Memory of Gills exudes a genuinely classical quality-cool-eyed and clear-eyed, intelligent, unsentimental, self-aware, and witty in the fullest and best sense. Carter takes our evolutionary development in the womb as a departure point for remembering or imagining our links with nonhuman animals, which make us feel both alien and alive. She writes of being “raised by wolves,” that “everyone marries into another species,” and of “hearing things” in the voices of the rattlesnake plantain or the apple core. With an offbeat, sometimes-gallows humor-the poems’ subjects range from roadkill to stingray-human sex to a traffic ticket for avoiding toads on the road-that looks at our connections of blood, home, and exile, The Memory of Gills nonetheless speaks of hope that we belong where we are.
- Winner of the NC Literary and Historical Association’s Roanoke-Chowan Award, 2007.
- Nominated by LSU Press for Pulitzer, National Book Award, and Kate Tufts Prizes.
- Interview about the book in Panhandler, vol. 5
- Review in Cider Press Review, vol. 8
2006, LSU Press | 59 pages | ISBN: 9780807131763
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Catherine Carter 