Available in 2025: The Tears of Things: Poems, a book about finding solace and joy in nature, reflection, and remembrance. Order now.
The Tears of Things charts Catherine Hamrick’s movement through changing relationships, landscapes, and gardens in the Midwest and Deep South. Observing seasonal flourishes and decay reminds us that love, joy, longing, sorrow, and gratitude arise from life’s imperfection and brevity. Available through independent bookstores, online retailers, and Madville Publishing.
Praise for The Tears of Things
Midwest Book Review by James A. Cox, editor in chief: If you only have time for a single volume of memorable and emotionally engaging poetry, make it “The Tears of Things: Poems” by Catherine Hamrick. Her free verse compositions paint word picture images that truly resonate with the reader. A compendium of wordsmithing raised to an impressive level of literary excellence.”
Southern Literary Review by Claire Matturro, associate editor: The Tears of Things is an exquisite, sensory-rich and sensitive body of poems that vividly capture with what it means to love, lose, fall, get up, and do it all again. Hamrick’s language is consistently vibrant, and often unique.
As her poems are often rooted in place, The Tears of Things is richly infused with genuine Southern touches. Equally moving are Hamrick’s explorations of family ties and their unraveling. Counterbalancing this sorrow are poems that celebrate nature’s persistence and beauty as well as the magic of renewal.
All in all, a splendid collection of poetry. Organized into five parts—Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, plus “The Fifth Season,” the many poems in The Tears of Things are memorable, warm, relatable—and stunning.
“The Tears of Things is a first book that reads like the work of an accomplished, established poet.” By Jennifer Horne, poet laureate of Alabama (2017-2021), The Alabama Writers’ Forum.
Artfully crafted poems address aging, mortality, and rebirth; grief, depression, and the return of joy; and the loss of romantic love and the possibility of loving again.
The narrative is not the point, so much, though, as the lyrical and cyclical nature of Hamrick’s vision. Seasons return and repeat, but never exactly the same way twice, and lyric precision is one way to capture the moment, not by stopping time but by honoring the awareness it imposes.
Life should not be rushed through, nor should these poems. While varying in form and length, each offers a moment of consciousness, a window into a psyche in the process of change and growth, a determined valuing of this gorgeous, heartbreaking world.
“Poetry collection encourages the reader to slow down and notice the world” by C.T. Salazar. Special to the Mississippi Clarion-Ledger.
In “The Tears of Things,” poet Catherine Hamrick provides a vivid proof of the world. … Hamrick’s speaker is interested in the experience of noticing the world in front of her rather than imagining a destination elsewhere.
The poet’s gift of attention makes even the small images in a poem relishable to readers, as in the collection’s opening poem “Iowa Dreams” where Hamrick captures moments easy to miss and elevates them to instances of beauty: “where needle-thin bird tracks ghosted– / a temple bell chimed copper prayers.” The subtle shifts in the line “a temple bell chimed copper prayers” working through the vowels up and back down the alphabet almost in perfect sequence adds a musicality reinforcing the image itself. Hamrick’s lines are just as memorable for their out-loud quality as they are for the image the lines articulate.
The poet ends at a beginning, beautifully with a poem titled “At Sunrise: Metta Meditation” by offering a blessing: “may you be peaceful, / may you be well, / may you know emerald springs / and ruby-throated joy.”
Many lines will stick with the reader long after closing the collection, but the feat that makes Hamrick a great poet is the task she gives readers: to pay attention to the world as we’re living in it.
“Seasons of Grief in ‘The Tears of Things'” by Mandianne Berg. The Southern Review of Books.
Catherine Hamrick’s “The Tears of Things” is a collection of poetry
that shares detailed portrayals of both physical and emotional landscapes. …The poetry, unexpectedly, eschews spring as a start and instead commences in winter. Descriptions that are visceral — the cold, darkness and stark places alluding to sadness and quiet tears. … The spring section is also filled with poetry that highlights nature, birds, flowers and more. … The poetry of summer describes nature, often as if it were artwork. This both benefits from her detailed descriptions, while balancing it with enough detachment to serve as a reminder that this is a collection centered around loss. … Fall is a season naturally given to contemplation of decay and the readying for hibernation.
Instead of being a place to put poems that didn’t fit elsewhere, the final chapter, ‘The Fifth Season,’ creates both a summation and a sense of afterthought. This ends the collection with an unhurried and timeless feeling. Just like seasons bring about a natural full circle, this collection creates wistfulness and a desire to start again at the beginning. This, in order to once again immerse in Hamrick’s balancing of detailed descriptions, while holding a through line of melancholy and release.
Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine: These poems mine deeply for a richness in both language and imagery that cuts against the flatness of much contemporary poetry. With deep roots in nature poetry like Mary Oliver’s, as well as in memories of childhood and the excited and worried journeys of adult life, The Tears of Things renders the world in full—they are what we find everywhere we look.
Jay Lamar, editor of Old Enough: Southern Women Artists and Writers on Creativity and Aging: In precise language and detailed imagery, Catherine Hamrick traces cycles of human illness and loss over four seasons. The persistence of memory and the insistence on perseverance—to understand, to make peace, to come out on the other side—is rewarded by a fifth season, a lagniappe of acceptance and joy. Throughout this powerful, sophisticated collection, the unexpected and breathtaking beauty of nature is observed with immense care and accuracy. Hamrick is a poet of great sensitivity and skill who reminds us that we’re “not out of nature yet.”
T.K. Thorne, author of The Magic City Stories Trilogy and Behind the Magic Curtain: The Tears of Things is a stunning journey into Catherine Hamrick’s relationship with nature. Her beautiful, sensual poems waste no words, evoking images that stir something deeper. Take your time experiencing these rich creations. You will want to taste them more than once.