“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.”—Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days
The Tears of Things: Poems by Catherine Hamrick, Madville Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-963695-11-3 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-963695-12-0 ebook $9.99
Available for preorder. Releases February 18, 2025
Debut Collection Explores Therapeutic Value of Nature’s “Five” Seasons
A content strategist and copywriter who embraced poetry later in life, Catherine Hamrick orders the seasons to her liking and throws in a fifth for good measure in her debut poetry collection, The Tears of Things. Starting with Midwest winters, she cycles through depression, loss, and changing relationships. She leans into the discomfort of mental illness as a doctor digs into family history: “the great-great something or other suicide / and my grandfather losing weekends to binges / on Poe, Camels, silence, and drink.”
Using images drawn from the natural world, Hamrick finds a way to work through challenges common to people navigating life. Moving through spring and summer, she seizes details and turns them into stories: the therapy of downsizing to a small apartment after separation and the solace of small things, like sinking down to the “shoe-level color roars” of purple crocuses or awakening as a trout’s “silvery leap spatters / this drowsy morning, / now tail-thrashed alert.”
Through remembrance and reflection, Hamrick processes the loss of her parents. Rather than a complete portrait of her mother, the reader catches glimpses, as if the author is attempting to reconstruct an individual diminished by Alzheimer’s yet going through the motions of an earlier time: “a clockwork doll, / dotting lipstick on her Cupid’s bow / and lower lip then coloring / inside the lines and inner / corners, ready for my father’s return / —six hours too soon.”
Hamrick connects to her dad through narrative, such as D-day when he was a teenage pharmacist mate collecting the dead and dwindling “the morphine on who has the best chance.” She recounts their fishing in a Florida lake: “a hot field of lily pads floating on water as dark / as ripened plums—where Old Granddaddy lurked, / king of a mythic domain beyond taxonomic rank.”
Midlife is a time of sorting through what truly matters—and recognizing life’s brevity. Hamrick captures the “chlorophyll-starved splendor” of fall firing across the Blue Ridge mountains. She grieves “the rasping choir” as “frost pales the trees and thins chirping, / whirring call-and-response night song.” Release is the theme of the fifth season. In “Birdwatch,” she notes homely turkey vultures: their “red, shrunken heads, wrinkled, / scrubbed bald, like the scalps of monks.” Yet the final image soars, the birds “thermal riding, with the two-tone underside / of their wings spread in shallow V’s—carrion-feaster comfort / wing-warping on a cleansing breeze.”
Madville Publishing is a nonprofit 501(c)3 in Lake Dallas, Texas, publishing literary fiction, nonfiction (memoir and essays), poetry, and fantasy.
Praise for The Tears of Things: Poems
“These poems mine deeply for a richness in both language and imagery that cuts against the flatness of much contemporary poetry. They catch the ragged glory of “where blush / camellias cling through winter then downturn, / bell-like and ruffled with golden rot,” and daffodils “marching in patches, / like bonneted Dutch dolls on the quilts / hand-stitched by my grandmother in the halo / of a Depression glass kerosene lamp.” Hamrick takes on the heaviest experiences with grace and candor, offering visceral and healing detail in a father’s remembrance of the D-Day beach landing and in the vicissitudes of mental health struggle and treatment. 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.”
—Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine
“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.’”
—Jay Lamar, editor of Old Enough: Southern Women Artists and Writers on Creativity and Aging
“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.”
—T.K. Thorne, author of The Magic City Stories Trilogy and Behind the Magic Curtain