Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead

Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead is a beautiful collection of Catherine Graham’s award-winning poetry. Spanning twenty years of writing these poems trace Graham’s arc from ARC Poetry Magazine’s initial observation that “Graham is a young poet whose work should be closely attended to” to the Toronto Star writing “Catherine Graham’s seventh book of poetry is an intricate reverie.” Poems within this collection circle around profound themes, including family, healing, loss and love, but they are written with a delight in the natural world, a delicate line and ethereal imagery. Here, birds are gathered in bouquets, a ghost is a fold in the mind and the snow holds light. Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead is a must-have volume from a much-loved poet.

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

“She tracks her perilous journey through [cancer] treatment metaphorically, in taut, lyrically distilled poems that evoke a nightmarish fantasy world. Her figurative language is vivid, rooted in sensation […] Like the fairy tales and myths that these poems often echo, The Celery Forest is spellbinding, unsettling but powerful.”
– Toronto Star

“Graham’s poems are sparely worded but full of evocative images that vividly convey a wide range of emotion, from passion to grief.”
– Her Red Hair Rises on the Wings of Insects