Books

Below you will find my new full-length book, Once: A Golden Shovel Collection (Kelsay Books), as well as my chapbooks, including links for purchase. Once is also available in several bookstores.

Cathy Barber Books on Bookshelves

Once: A Golden Shovel Collection

Kelsay Books

$20

My latest book, five years in the making, is out! Once: A Golden Shovel Collection is available from the publisher, Kelsay Books, on Amazon, and at the following bookstores: Bookshop West Portal (San Francisco, CA), Fireside Books (Chagrin Falls, OH), Heights Arts (Cleveland Heights, OH), Mac’s Backs (Cleveland Heights, OH), and Visible Voice (Cleveland, OH).

“The poems in Cathy Barber’s Once: A Golden Shovel Collection carry the reader seamlessly across decades—from the belonging and otherness of childhood and youth, through cancer, recovery, and home. It’s easy to lose sight of the golden shovel form in which these poems are written—just read and enjoy them.”
—Sara McAulay, author of Catch Rides and Chance

An example poem from the collection, with Issa’s haiku in bold:

Cat

     after Kobayashi Issa  

Who knows what goes
into a poem and what goes out,
words, spaces; a thought comes
but soon is cut back
like running bamboo—the
scissors more important than the pen. I love
to laze in the morning, my life
composed of coffee, of granola, of
news of last nights score, a
shoulder heavy with my fidgety cat.

Aardvarks, Bloodhounds, Catfish, Dingoes

Abecedarian chapbook

Dancing Girl Press

$9 (includes domestic shipping & handling)

A slim volume of seventeen abecedarian poems; each is twenty-six words long, one for each letter of the alphabet, with the occasional exception of X, which just doesn’t have many words to offer.

An example from the collection:

Azaleas, bougainvillea—
constellations drafting
ever fuller,
gracing home
in juicy
kisses, lips
moist, necks
of plantings.
Quivering roses
stir toes,
unearth vestigial
wonder. Explode,
yellow zinnias.

Aardvarks, Bloodhounds, Catfish, Dingos Book Cover

All We Hungered For

Free verse chapbook

Cover artwork by Jane McCreary

$14 (includes domestic shipping & handling)

Free verse chapbook printed by Small Poetry Press. As Clive Matson notes in his blurb, “Read Cathy Barber’s All We Hungered For and be surprised by the raw, abraded world under the careful veneer of our lives.”

From “Love Song: A Pantoum”:

Someday you’ll break your mother’s heart.
You never lift a finger to help.
Is it too much to ask?
You’ll never change, you.

All We Hungered For Book Cover

one drop of water and the glass overflows

Limited edition letterpress haiku chapbook

Cover artwork by Jane McCreary

Printed by Paper Crane Press in Half Moon Bay, California. Previously sold in Bay Area bookstores.

Sold out

Sample haiku from the chapbook:

Hot snake on a hot
     rock. The hawk’s shadow offers
          a flicker of shade.

one drop of water and the glass overflows Book Cover

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