Brats - Softcover

Clark-Sayles, Catharine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1635346479 ISBN 13: 9781635346473

Publisher: Finishing Line Press, 2018

About this title

About the Author:

Catharine Clark-Sayles is a geriatrician practicing north of San Francisco. She travelled across the United States extensively with a military family while she was young, then became an Army doctor. When she turned forty she discovered that she had missed her twenties the first time around and reconnected with poetry to find them. She has published two books of poetry with Tebot Bach Press: One Breath in 2008 is poetry drawn from medical training and practice. Lifeboat was published in 2012. Recent work has appeared in Spillway, Locuspoint.org, The Squaw Valley Review, Persimmon Tree, The Healing Art of Writing, vols.1 and 2., Neat, The Healing Muse, many of annual The Marin Poetry Center Anthology and The Poetry Farmer's Almanacs.

Review:

Catharine Clark-Sayles’ chapbook Brats is about time—about growing up in a military family and the passage from being daughter, sister, friend, student to being a doctor. There’s a strong sense of authenticity to Clark-Sayles’ work, which makes me eager, as I finish one poem to see what comes next. Her poems are fierce, yet tender and moving. “Always,” she writes, “you think there will / be time for stories and remembering again.” Yes, that’s what this book tells us. Tempus fugit. Pay attention, she reminds us. Yes. . . we shall.

—Susan Terris, Ghost of Yesterday: New & Selected Poems

 

Love is at the center of these beautifully rendered poems where the “missing / stories will be found.” Catharine Clark-Sayles weaves her present life as a doctor together with her story of growing up as a military brat. From “too many places to name them all,” Clark-Sayles recreates vivid scenes of her childhood without rancor or self-pity, offering us the wisdom of a woman who looks upon her uprooted past with acceptance and compassion. And although, inevitably, “love comes and is lost,” this book assures us that “a poem may stay / to hold it all.”

—Joan Baranow, PhD, Professor of English, Director of MA Humanities and MFA Creative Writing, School of Liberal Arts and Education

 

About this edition

• Publisher: Finishing Line Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1635346479
• ISBN 13: 9781635346473
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 34