Then and Again By Catherine Stearns

"Catherine Stearns’s new poetry collection, “Then & Again,’’ recently won the Northfield, Mass.-based Slate Roof Press chapbook contest. Stearns, who lives in south Natick and is writer-in-residence at Roxbury Latin School in Boston, writes with an understated elegance. Her lines mix the accumulation of the everyday — “beans, new potatoes, thyme,” a green canoe on the river, concrete where geodes get cracked — with higher states, the glowing flares of memory, and all kinds of passage. There is good nature here: a tree is “bearded with a cloud of honeybees”; and all the hard k’s in “with a flick/of her wrist, she broke/the chicken’s neck” speak to the sound of exactly what’s happening. The collection traffics in the mysteries, the questions that rise and can only get answered with approximations, intuitions, shadows: “Why else remember what we do,/ Why else love what we love?”"--Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe