Other is the perfect choice for this collection’s title. Not only does it capture the dominant trope of borrowing the mindset of such biblical characters as Mary Magdalene, Lot’s wife, Salomé, and Bathsheba, but it also raises the issue of the degree to which Catherine Pritchard Childress invents personae as speakers in what seem to be deeply personal poems. Just as her characterizations of biblical women cut through our perceived notions of their roles and destinies to construct other women who defy easy categorization, so do the “personal” poems resist the easy labeling of confessional. This adept handling of voices alone establishes this volume as “other” than an ordinary first book.
— Don Johnson, author of The Importance of Visible Scars, Watauga Drawdown, Here and Gone: New and Selected Poems, and More than Heavy Rain
In this wonderfully complex collection, Catherine Pritchard Childress explores the depths of the “Other,” sometimes slipping into the silken gown of womanhood, sometimes bearing its hard yoke. She stands in the kitchen with bushels of corn to be shucked, washed, cut, and cooked, aching with no less desire than the storied Magdalene, Salomé, and Leah who dance with grief and passion in these pages. Other teaches and tempts us with guerrilla knowledge of the female experience–the mother painting her toes fiery red, the daughter forsaking the pillar of salt, the wife amid piles of Silver Queen, bending to no one’s idea of who she should be.
— Linda Parsons Marion, author of Home Fires, Mother Land, and Bound
The poems in Other move seamlessly between worlds, invested in the biblical and the contemporary, the mythical and the uncomfortably real. The light and the dark always glance off one another in this work, which has gravity and scale, as in “Wife to Wife,” “Salomé’s Ghazal,” and the title poem, while balancing that weight with wit and verve, as in “Pedicure,” and “Elegy for June Cleaver.” Catherine Pritchard Childress delivers poems that startle with the clarity of their intelligence and with the essential rightness of their observations. Other is a book of strong voices and wide-ranging perspectives, none of which will be easily forgotten. Essentially, this is a book of enchantments.
— Jesse Graves, author of Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine and Basin Ghosts
Catherine Pritchard Childress 