Catherine Arra's first chapbook of poems, Slamming & Splitting, was a 2013 winner of the Red Ochre Press Chapbook Contest. Here, Arra takes the reader through the subterranean layers and avalanches of divorce without sentimentality, blame, easy answers or magnanimous forgiveness. She likens the struggle and dynamics in love to that of atoms in a super collider: an "adventure of slamming and splitting/ speeding and slowing, of annihilating parts/ back to primordial silence." Love is hard. When it works, it's glorious; when it doesn't, a reckoning with oneself is inevitable as Arra writes: "The woman lost in the mirror of another self/ stared hard from the silver, demanding/ recognition.""Catherine Arra tackles a subject that often sinks into sentimentality in others' work, but not here. The examination of love lost and a woman's reinvention of herself in Slamming & Splitting is brave and well-crafted, peppered with references to cooking, physics, automobiles and living in New York City. The poems are intelligent and surprising in language and image." - Lori Desrosiers, author of The Philosopher's Daughter, Inner Sky, Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak, Editor of Naugatuck River Review."With a wry sense of humor and a generous heart, Catherine Arra's Slamming & Splitting takes us from raw pain to the patch-worked remains of a survivor. In each of her carefully constructed poems she questions, answers, wavers. Arra looks to science for truths, her kitchen for comfort, the seeding and harvesting of her garden for the pleasure of birth and rebirth, without tying the book up in a happy ending. In "Divorce Pearls," Arra writes: "Letting go still loving, still/ is like passing a kidney stone/ the calcified biology of loving/ spun hard over churning years/ grinding through a single portal/ the worst kind of internal bleeding/ no matter how microscopic."- Tina Barry, author of Mall Flower.
