Out Toward Morning - Paperback

by Catherine Stearns (Author)

Spent by their losses, people come to an impasse and must forge new ways to understand the world. As the philosopher Stanley Cavell wrote, " We have to learn to think after thinking comes to a dead end." In the poems of Out Toward Morning, leaf-gatherers, dog-walkers, children and artists are caught unlearning ways of thinking, to live " after thinking." Stearns blends memory and history with humor and hope in poems that present us with a coming-of-age with age, its fears, paradoxes, and freedom, reminding us that while change is part of life, so too, inevitably, is transformation. In the poem that closes this collection, when a transfigured Daphne " examines her tattoos," we see how the most beautiful, redeemable of human forms emerges " when the gods bear down."

Author Biography

Originally from the Midwest, Catherine Stearns received her MFA in Poetry from the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. Her first book of poems, The Transparency of Skin (New Rivers Press), was a Minnesota Voices Project winner and a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards. A later chapbook, Then & Again, winner of the Elyse Wolf Prize, was published by Slate Roof Press. She has received grants and awards from the Iowa Arts Council, The Dana Award, the Loft-McKnight Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and her poems have been anthologized in a collection of writing by American women abroad. She taught writing and literature in the Boston area for many years, and now lives with her husband, Richard Klug, a film director and cinematographer, on the Charles River in Natick, Massachusetts.