Catherine Carter will visit City Lights on Friday, July 11th at 6:00pm to share her new poetry collection, By Stone and Needle: Poems.
Winner of the 2025 L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award.
Shimmering to the pulse of the unseen, By Stone and Needle circles like a compass needle around the figure of the witch. Catherine Carter concocts a book of secular spells and incantations for engaging with, and meditating upon, a world in which all things are connected, in which symbol slides into literal, spirituality into science, exact observation into lamentation and love.
The poems in By Stone and Needle spin connecting threads between night sweats, witch drownings, creation stories, pedicures, goddesses—and, especially, between miraculously interconnected ecosystems and the forces that threaten them. Speakers encompass personae including lactobacilli bacteria, bodily yeasts, and the classical witch Medea, while elsewhere a contemporary version of the goddess Artemis appears in Appalachia. Carter’s poetic vision imbues everyday moments such as putting on a coat, piercing an ear, confronting racism and patriarchy, or eating onion slices with a new definition of magic as “the human thing.”
Catherine Carter is a poet, educator, and scholar, and she is the author of four full-length collections of poetry (By Stone and Needle, Larvae of the Nearest Stars, The Swamp Monster at Home, The Memory of Gills, all with LSU Press), two chapbooks (Marks of the Witch, and Good Morning, Unseen both with Jacar Press), and a co-translated edition of the 33,000-line poem Confessio Amantis by 14th-century poet, John Gower.
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!["By Stone and Needle" Book Launch with Catherine Carter, 11 July | Event in Sylva | AllEvents](https://cdn-az.allevents.in/events7/banners/c18c0219316f22b4f168ec6e75e4d20058f3a742c6608dd649a07c672c7f3a96-rimg-w1200-h675-dcffffff-gmir?v=1750129432 ""By Stone and Needle" Book Launch with Catherine Carter, 3 East Jackson Street, Sylva, NC, United States, North Carolina 28779, 11 July 2025 | AllEvents | AllEvents")
