Larvae of the Nearest Stars

Book excerpt: Larvae of the Nearest Stars offers deeply serious verse that packs profound emotional and spiritual power while encouraging readers to laugh out loud. Catherine W. Carter’s quirky, accessible poems bridge and question binaries—human and nonhuman, lyric and narrative, science and magic, river trash and galaxies. The poems’ subjects range from dowsers and liver spots to the mysteries of two-seater outhouses and encounters with sentient milk jugs and “our lady of the bagels.” The collection begins and ends by confronting the necessity—and the promise—to bear witness to the world as it is, addressing how we can manage to love the world in the face of everything that makes doing so a challenge. The poems in this engaging and meditative collection are sometimes dark, often funny, but always surprising.