Join us at City Lights Bookstore on Saturday, April 20th at 3:00pm for a poetry reading with Catherine Carter and Tina Barr. Catherine will read from her latest work, Good Morning, Unseen, and Tina from her new book of poetry, Pink Moon.
In Catherine Carter’s latest chapbook, the poet considers the world beyond the surface: the lives of microbes, housekeepers, and history; tendrils of magic in both blessings and curses; and the magnetism of love, gin, sorrow, and the dark, cool earth. With her characteristic charm, compassion, and humor, Carter tells the stories of a world unseen, all with the uniquely poetic instinct to animate. Good Morning, Unseen is utter bounty in a small package—just as a chapbook should be.
The poems in Pink Moon examine powerlessness over the body as well as in the environment. They explore the Western North Carolina area inhabited by the Cherokee, focusing on local inhabitants and lore, before reaching outward to other geographies: Egypt, Botswana, Ethiopia, India, in patterns of circularity and juxtaposition. Ranging over varying subjects: the Tuskegee experiment, the Ku Klux Klan, sexual and physical abuse, love both transgressive and domestic, familial patterns of incest and greed, Pink Moon uses the environment Tina Barr inhabits, and the virus that inhabits her own body, as bridges to the virus in the body politic. They illuminate the idea of contagion, positing the issues of race, and species extinction as an epidemic. Pink Moon is the inaugural winner of the Jacar Press Editor’s Choice Award, selected by our Managing Editor, Natalie Eleanor Patterson, to an outstanding runner-up in the Jacar Press Chapbook or Full-Length Book Contests.
Catherine is the author of three full-length collections of poetry–Larvae of the Nearest Stars, The Swamp Monster at Home, and The Memory of Gills, all with LSU Press–and a chapbook–Marks of the Witch, with Jacar Press. A professor of English at Western Carolina University, Catherine Carter teaches creative writing and English Education. She is also the interim managing editor for Cider Press Review and serves as the Jackson County representative of the North Carolina Writers’ Network.
Tina Barr’s volumes of poetry include 3 full-length books: Green Target (2017 winner of the Barrow Street Press Book Prize, judged by Patricia Spears Jones), Kaleidoscope (Iris Press), and The Gathering Eye, (Tupelo Press Editor’s Award). Her chapbooks include The Fugitive Eye (Painted Bride Quarterly Press contest winner, chosen by Yusef Komyunyakaa); Red Land, Black Land, winner of the Longleaf Press Chapbook Contest, Methodist College Press, NC; and At Dusk on Naskeag Point, winner of the Flume Press Chapbook Contest, Chico, CA. She has received Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Tennessee Arts Commission, The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The MacDowell Colony, & elsewhere. Poems have been published in Atlanta Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Book Review, Barrow Street Journal, Crab Orchard Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Harvard Review, Louisiana Literature, Tar River Review, and elsewhere.
To order copies of these books in advance call us at (828) 586-9499.