Æther: An Out-of-Body Lyric – Catherine Graham

Aether Cover

*Winner of the 2022 Fred Kerner Book Award*
*Finalist for the 2022 Trillium Book Award*
Read the Toronto Star article here.
*Finalist for the 2021 Toronto Book Awards*

Judges’ Comments:

“Aether entwines in poetry as well as prose a deeply explored experience of surviving life and death as a daughter and as an adult. This book-length poetic essay gifts us with a personal account of the precious mundanities of healing along with the guilt and joy of being alive longer than our parents. With poetic delicacy counterpointed by plain speaking, Aether never shirks from the realities we must all face if we are to see the experience of living through to the end.”

“A poignant, arresting mix of hauntingly beautiful poetry and prose, Aether is an ode to family, grief and long-buried secrets; a contemplation on love, loss, longing and healing; and a stingingly real portrayal of survivor guilt. A compelling and profoundly moving journey through the simple joys of family ties that bind and the insidiousness of cancer and death that tear them apart, this indelible must-read masterfully captures the heart and then resonates long after in the mind and the soul.”

Catherine Graham has created a luminous homage to family, to cancer and to the strange windings of truth. Swimming through time and space, Graham introduces her mother, her father and herself and the cancers that pull them apart and bring them together. Memories mesh with visitations and multiple stories unfold of pain and loss, hidden tragedy, forgiveness and growth. With an otherworldly delicacy Graham stitches it all together to create a book-length lyric essay of lingering and profound beauty, a paean to the complexity of love and survival.

“Catherine Graham’s seventh book of poetry is an intricate reverie, in poetry and prose, which floats back and forth in time and between memories, dreams and reflections . . . Graham is an accomplished lyric poet.”
— Barb Carey, Toronto Star

“It is a masterpiece. How Graham has put it together, for one thing. The melding of poetry and prose into a beautiful and heartbreaking skein, gradual revelation, going back/going forward, weaving in and out, repeating and broadening the meaning as you go. A journey that is fascinating, heartrending, and courageous.”
— Marilyn Gear Pilling, author of The Gods of East Wawanosh

“This might be shelved in poetry, but it’s essay and mystery and grief and healing and love too. Graham has a spiraling way of writing that is mesmerizing. With each revisit of a fact or feeling, more is revealed. Everything about this book is perfect – word choice, pacing, even the presentation on the page.”
— Jennifer Geraedts, Beagle and Wolf Books

“In the lyric essay Æther: An Out-of-Body Lyric, Catherine Graham explores how a cancer diagnosis can change a family forever. Æther is about Catherine, her mother and her father, as this disease turns their life upside down and they grapple with the grief, pain and loss that comes with cancer, but also with the joy, forgiveness, strength and growth.”
— CBC Books

“Part poetry, part prose, Æther: An Out-of-Body Lyric by Catherine Graham is a wonderfully unconventional read. More than a memoir of a breast cancer survivor, Graham writes from that in-between world of soft wakefullness and dreaming during post-op recovery at Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital. In this state, dreams become memories and memories become clarity. For anyone who has undergone surgery, they can easily identify with the way Graham has penned this personal narrative. Æther is an engaging work and a unique experience.”
— Toronto Book Awards Jury

“Loss teaches us lessons, and the poet has conveyed this notion so poignantly in this beautiful hybrid, lyric essay…she reminds her readers, “Quietness is a way of being strong.” Yes, in a world that seems more and more overexposed and much too loud, Graham reminds us to swim “back to the girl you were swimming forward,” knowing that we must ultimately “side with” our inside voices, to hold space for ourselves, so that we can speak up and tell our own stories as women.”
— Kim Fahner, periodicity: a journal of poetry and poetics

“Through poetry and prose, Æther: An Out-of-Body Lyric provides a breathtaking homage to family, to cancer and to the strange windings of truth. A finalist for the 2021 Toronto Book Award, and a Toronto Lit Up selected book, Graham’s poetry captures incredible moments of pain, love and forgiveness with beauty.”
— from Buzzworthy Books List, Toronto International Festival of Authors

“Æther: An Out-of-Body Lyric is a deeply moving account of coming to terms with personal loss and an intelligent, sensitive probing of the creative process. What was glimpsed in The Celery Forest and embellished in Quarry is here in new forms and fresh angles. It’s a seamless blending of memoir/autobiography with poetry. Accounts of loss and grief, marginalisation, and self-acceptance are stitched together via a spine of recurrent images—birds, deer, quarry, cancer cells—and rich, vibrant vocabulary. It illustrates how, through writing painful experiences, trauma may be ‘owned’ and redirected into nurturance, creativity and a gift to readers. A gorgeous achievement.”
— Kathleen McCracken, author of Double Self Portrait with Mirror: New and Selected

“Death may have found Graham as a key theme in her writing but the way she has dealt with it brings a sense of glory and light to the terrain of love and familial bonds that I have rarely seen on any page.”
— Mel McMahon, author of Beneath Our Feet

“The collection may be subtitled an “out-of-body lyric” but to me it felt like a “bodily epic,” rooted in metastasis and blood, in anorexia and sexuality, in literary rejection and tormented relationships, in “pain like paper dolls unfolding” and in “ghosts…[that] walk/through water, stone.” And there are birds as our Virgils, along with the mysterious leapings of deer….At the core, the truth behind the arc of Graham’s powerful work is that “the dead remain alive through words,” that “your subject matter chooses you,” that through language and all its modes of remembering, you become, eternally, “a custodian…of lives.”
— Catherine Owen, Marrow Reviews

“Genre-defying memoir.”
— Toronto Star

“While the poet’s journey may have come out of the aether, and all the visitations and memories that entails, there’s a groundedness in that acknowledgment of survival. Readers can be reassured by the end of the book that it is possible to travel from reverie to revelations and a form of wholeness.”
— Mary Ann Moore, Story Circle Network

Æther: An Out-of-Body Lyric appears on the 49^th Shelf Most Anticipated Spring Poetry Preview and What We’re Reading: Editors’ Picks, Hamilton Review of Books.

“I felt winded, wilting, weak. The way the child winds through the lives of the adults; the adults through the child; the profound and devastating revelations and always the quarry, in all its moods. And the deer and the legs like swans and the interior of us and the exterior we are all called on to present. Deeply affecting and brilliant collection.”
— Joan Newmann, Dead End

“I read Aether from cover-to-amazement, while crossing to Scotland on a Stena ferry – and did not see the green hills emerging or hear the harbour-clunk, and disembarked some where quite other – a rare alchemy when a book can do that!”
— Kate Newmann, I am a Horse