The Dash Between Us by Cathy Porter

Reading Cathy Porter’s new chapbook, The Dash Between Us, brings to mind two antecedents in particular: e.e.cummings “littlehowtown” and Paul Simon’s, “Our Little Town.” Interpersonal relationships are defined by the spaces between people, dead end jobs lead to graveyard shifts where clerks can look forward to armed robbery for pitiful amounts of money; employment at zero opportunity waitressing jobs at no account bars and restaurants; streets filled with rootless PTSD veterans who disappear at dusk, and weekends spent at karaoke, singing along while drunk to favorite songs over and over again. Sound familiar? It should.

–Alan Catlin, editor Misfit Magazine

Bookended by poems about Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the spare, brutal poems in Cathy Porter’s powerful collection speak eloquently of dwindling hopes and time slipping ineluctably away. And yet, she insists, in the words of Dylan Thomas, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” These poems demand reading over and over again.

–Charles Rammelkamp, author of Ugler Lee and Mortal Coil.

The poems in this collection touch upon inequities, indignities, and difficult times in the lives of everyday people. We are witness to the many versions of pain visited upon the unlucky as Porter shares hard truths within tight, precise, succinctly crafted stories. “Our world cries hard…” she writes in a poem entitled “Inclusion,” a stunning evocation of what it means to be accepted in a time and place of sharp edges and exclusion. This is her strongest collection to date, offering examples of social injustice, bad luck; the workers who manage to endure despite unfairness, ill health, and economic oppression.

–Jennifer Lagier, author of Covid Dissonance and Meditations on Seascapes and Cypress