Empty Space Places You by Cathy Cain

Cathy Cain is a painter with a poet’s eye and a poet with a painter’s. No matter where her eye focuses, details are infused with light—sunlight, moonlight, lamplight. “It’s about light,” she says in one poem, “how light turns through the day.” Even “into the night,” she writes in another, “I go with my candle.” In these poems about the everyday, its struggles and appreciations, Cathy Cain lights our way.
–Andrea Hollander

A devoted daughter, wife, mother, and grandmother, this poet asserts that “the light of kind touch can lead the blind.” She refuses to be calloused by mayhem and sorrow, naming “…life with its terror—/ a blessing.” Cathy Cain’s poems meet the world with a steady, loving gaze. Her elegies, her praises, are image-rich songs of fierce and compassionate endearment.

–Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita