Catherine Arra is a native of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where she facilitates local writing groups. A multiple Pushcart nominee, her poetry and prose have been published widely in literary journals online and in print, and in anthologies. She is the author of four full-length collections and five chapbooks. Last Evening With All the Versions of Myself was first finalist in the Donna Palacio-Wolf Poetry Book Prize. She lives with poet and photographer Alex Stolis and their dog Daisy. Her website is www.catherinearra.com
PRAISE:
“Good poems (and these are really good) have the power to rip the curtains away from things we know are there, but don’t talk about openly. Arra’s insights are raw and honest and earnest. When she says “Give witness to each death, betrayal, and ambush. / Mark them all with a cross and a prayer.” she speaks for us all, for what we’ve suffered, how we’ve survived. These aren’t just “all the versions of herself”—they are versions of you and me and the childhood terror, the grown-up hopes, the coming-to-terms with life’s unfairness that run through us all. All this, balanced with the wisdom of “Understand it hurts because you loved / not because you didn’t.” This is a collection to be read carefully and quietly. You may find you learn as much about yourself as you do about the author.”
–j.lewis, editor of Verse-Virtualand author of all these things are broken
Catherine Arra may not be the first poet to confront womanhood’s hazards. But in Last Evening With All the Versions of Myself, the poet fans those hazards like cards in a winning hand, and we glimpse not only the personae–defiant and diffident, tender and outraged–promised by the title but aspects of those masks rendered in the most animate terms. Hewn from fairy tale, myth, pop culture, and lives tinted boldly, Arra’s are poems whose appetites are “glinting” and whose speakers welcome us “into new wilderness.”
–Joshua Davis, author of Authentic Embellishments: Fragments of a Life Saved by Poetry
“In these lush and unsparing poems, Catherine Arra confronts and configures the self as a composite of its many roles and iterations: daughter, wife, ex-wife, lover, friend, and woman. Whether posited as the poor little match girl, Cinderella, Dorothy, or any of the other feminine figures of fairy tale and fable that appear in these poems, all of the versions of the speaking self are marked by a hollowness, and a yearning to fill or overcome that lack at the core. There is a sense of acceptance flowing across this collection, perhaps best expressed in the stunning line addressed to the Tooth Fairy, “Bring me the gift of loss.” Across the five sections of Last Evening With All the Versions of Myself, Arra faces the tidal patterns of return and leaving, which flow through childhood, family, marriage, addiction, and divorce, finding some degree of solace in the understanding that “we are made from the same/dirt and ash.” I felt both nourished and electrified by this collection, and these poems which “root us in the bones/of loving.”
–Kristen Holt-Browning, author of Ordinary Devotion
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