Æther

In Æther Catherine Graham has created a luminous homage to family, cancer and the strange windings of truth. Swimming through time and space, Graham introduces her mother, her father and herself and the cancers that pull them apart and bring them together. Multiple stories unfold of pain and loss, hidden tragedy, forgiveness and growth. With an otherworldly delicacy Graham stitches it all together to create a book-length lyric essay of lingering and profound beauty.

AUTHOR

Catherine Graham

Catherine Grahams debut novel, Quarry, was a finalist for the Sarton Womens Book Award for Contemporary Fiction and Fred Kerner Book Award and won the Miramichi Readers The Very Best! Book Award and an Independent Publisher Book Awards gold medal for Fiction. She is the author of seven acclaimed poetry collections, including Æther: An Out-of-Body Lyric, nominated for a Toronto Book Awards and The Celery Forest, a CBC Best Book of the Year and finalist for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Her Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award and CAA Poetry Award. She teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto where she won an Excellence in Teaching Award. A previous winner of the Toronto International Festival of Authors Poetry NOW competition, she leads their monthly book club and interviews for By the Lake Book Club. Visit her online at www.catherinegraham.com and @catgrahampoet

Reviews

“Loss teaches us lessons, and the poet has conveyed this notion so poignantly in this beautiful hybrid, lyric essay.”

– periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics

“Graham has transmuted the terrors of an encounter with cancer … into pure art that is fierce, true and unsullied by platitudes and truisms … a rare and extraordinary creation … The Celery Forest is a volume of poems wrought mainly in language that (like the language of Wallace Stevens, for example) is brilliantly and intriguingly circuitous.”

– Glasgow Review of Books