In this, her second book, Catherine Black weaves together the wonder, heartache, and “unlovely beauty” of a youth that is by turns charmed and disquieting. Straddling genres of memoir, prose, and poetry, A Hard Gold Threaddelights in the layering of keenly observed moments, in the subtle play of remembering and forgetting, and in the shift in perspective brought to bear on memory as it is transmuted by time. Reverent, sensitively rendered, and sometimes tongue in cheek, A Hard Gold Thread is an unconventional memoir inviting the reader into a meditation on the engulfing beauty of the world and the compulsion to turn away from it. {Guernica Editions}

Catherine Black is Associate Professor and Chair of the Creative Writing BFA program at OCAD University. Catherine’s first collection of prose poetry Lessons of Chaos and Disaster was the second book in Guernica Edition’s “First Poets Series,” and her lyric nonfiction novella A Hard Gold Thread (Guernica, 2011) was nominated for the ReLit award. Her third book, Bewilderness, was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Broadly speaking, Catherine’s areas of interest and expertise in creative writing include experimentations in prose poetry and other hybrid forms such as the lyric essay and longer experimental fiction. Thematically, her work interrogates the reliability of memory, the intersections of imagination and reality, as well as issues of motherhood, ‘madness,’ and the dissociative aspects of grief and trauma. Catherine has recently begun to explore ways in which her writing might span media, through guerrilla poetry projects and the creation of literary objects.

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