What She Knows
There Comes a Time
Excerpt
I woke that morning
too tired to do anything,
even to get my coffee.
I knew it was time
and I made up my mind
about what to do.
What She Knows
Excerpt
“The itinerate evangelist holds her
hostage on her front porch,
demanding the date and time—
she accepted Jesus Christ
as her personal Savior, shouting:
“or else you’re damned,
and won’t be born again.” “
Both Sides
Excerpt
“It was serendipitous
walking down
the drug store aisle
after filling a prescription
glancing at the CDs
and finding Joni’s “Clouds,”
her favorite song,
because of the “both sides” angle.
It had been part
of their Joni Mitchell record collection.
She remembered its conundrums, even
though he had demanded that LP in the
divorce settlement. ”
Perpetual Memories
Excerpt
“The wind worries
The bluestem grasses
Like violins fussing
In an agitato passage
Ruffling the feathers of Rio Grande turkeys,
While a twenty-dollar bill blows
Out of the passenger seat
and beelines into hedgerows
For prairie chicken nests. “
Without Longitude
Excerpt
“Our eyeglasses lie on the floor
bows intertwined
like our bodies were last night
and again this morning.
I kiss your feet and legs
rounding to the inside of your thighs
sailing on the skin of desire.”
Testimonials
In this rich collection of poems, both narrative and lyrical, Catherine Rickbone asks whether and how the measure of our days measures us. She clocks the hours of lives spent in the quotidian details of needlework, Weight Watchers points, fortune cookie messages, and appointments blocked on weekly calendars, mindful that ever patiently waiting for each of us, there is ultimately “no appointment but one.”
In intricacies and intimacies, these poems capture knife-edge moments of transformation and fierce determinism, what we stitch together, what we unravel, and “how our fingers travel the hem of hope,” [wherein] we find the great gift to survive and transcend what breaks us, repeating, “I think I can, I think I can.”
Amy Sage Webb
Author of Save Your Own Life: Kansas StoriesCatherine Rickbone’s first full-length collection, What She Knows, reveals a poet of self-awareness and, as the title suggests, great knowing. Offering keen observations from the “late middle years” she reaches back to recall vinyl records, cameras with film, sensual trysts, broken couplings, and the press of aging parents. In this poetic examination, Rickbone reveals her greatest truth: She knows the grace of now.
Drew Myron
Author of Thin Skin: PoemsIn What She Knows, Catherine Rickbone collects five sections of poems that chronicle a “…family tree of regrets and/ recriminations.” Although they recount difficult, daunting experiences, Rickbone’s poems call on wisdom and wit to offer readers their “…moments of salvation.”
Paulann Petersen
Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita
Labyrinth Dance
“A labyrinth is a symbolic journey…
but it is a map we can really walk on,
blurring the difference between map and world.”
Rebecca Solnit
Wanderlust: A History of Walking
[Viking, 2000]