The Apple Tree

Bauhan Publishing: Meet Catherine Arnold

Interview with Deborah Kalb

Catherine Arnold & Richard Smith

Reading & Discussion

7 p.m. EST, Tuesday, September 16, 2025

Sponsored by The Writer’s Center

On Zoom

Free!

Register Here! 

Richard Smith is the author of Not a Soul but Us, a narrrative in sonnets. His new collection, Beyond Where Words Can Go, is due out April 2026

"Powerful and distinctive"

“Catherine Arnold's hiatuses, her stops and starts, allow space for disparate sensations to connect or to float free, sometimes both at once. Over and over, these powerful and distinctive poems manage to combine a dreamy discontinuity with a fearless focus on experiences and sensations that are often traumatic.”

- Rachel Hadas

"Shafts of light and pulsing energy"

“Catherine Arnold’s poems perform the sensitive work of a linguistic Geiger counter: revealing radioactive elements within domestic interiors, familial repressions, acts of maternal devotion, and art’s impulse. Marked by longing and observation of the human and natural worlds, the narrator of these poems gathers up shafts of light and pulsing energy in the everyday, turning them into word-spells that help us weather the disenchantment (and re-enchantment) we often experience in daily life. These poems achieve—in their seasoned maturity—wise equanimity, clear sight, and a sustaining version of the truth.” 

- Heather Treseler, author of Auguries & Divinations, Parturition, and Hard Bargain

There Is No Formula for Fox

It is       astonishment       recognition       body-joy
I see a fox       (twice a week       here)       vulpes       vulpes!
it is itself       disappearing       into itself       and again       itself       there is no
shading       into anything else                               the audacious unrepeatable
and the fox goes down the road             light feet
the tilt of the face
whittle and poise and shock       of red       unnegotiable  
and I cannot get there
I cannot know it       through words       cannot drag it slowly through
my understanding
the way I could       a dog       a horse       a lizard  
and when I see a fox             I
think of my daughter:
There is no formula for fox.

Repression, silence, and invisibility have always been important themes for me. This started very early because I was Dyslexic; I didn’t learn to read or write until I was nearly eleven. For years, I felt excluded from a world that everyone else had access to. Since I couldn’t use them “properly”, words became mysterious, even magical. When I finally learned to read, it was a revelation.

Years later, a second experience deepened my preoccupation with language. My daughter who, as a toddler, had been able to speak fluently, lost that ability slowly over two or three years. That made me hyper-aware of language, because I could hear her losing it. And there was no explanation. After that, we went through ten years together when she had no form of functional communication; I thought that would last forever. Out of that experience, I wrote my first book, Receipt for Lost Words. Then, during covid, she learned to type with me, so the words that had vanished began to appear again. That was another revelation. It brought back memories of what it had felt like when I’d learned to read years before: words could be given, and they could be taken away—and then they could be given again.

Being a writer and a painter are inseparable for me. I naturally generate images, and I think about everything in terms of color. I have a degree of synesthesia, so many words present themselves to me in color. There’s a poem in my new book, The Apple Tree, “Butter and Milk and Sugar”, which describes driving through Vermont when some jazz music comes on the radio. I’m driving past a graveyard, and there’s a long note on the saxophone that sounds like magenta. That note gets pulled out at the same time as the names on the gravestones I’m passing—they get pulled out and blurred and jumbled together. I like to think simultaneously in words and pictures.

As a writer and a painter, I’ve tried to escape invisibility, to find a voice.

Winner of 2023 The May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize

Available via Bauhan Publishing

Receipt for Lost Words is a mother’s attempt to understand a world in which her child does not, cannot, speak. It’s an accounting that Catherine Arnold renders in breathtakingly moving, spaced-apart phrases, little gasps of insight into a parent’s heartbreak, bafflement, and isolation: “Nature now   is what I see     through glass.” And, if we hold our breath through desperate parental denial and efforts to “word the silence,” we release it when Stella—the one who cannot speak—makes her presence known: “the strong     unhurried length    of me / I am Stella.” The spare, sensual language of Stella’s point of view stuns—as in this description of her father: “a big    thirsty shape / the hum of him.” What emerges is a new sense of the world, a magical and fairy-tale shift in which “. . . everything / that seemed to matter     before / has been forgotten.” Catherine Arnold has accomplished nothing less than the embodiment, in words, of wordlessness. A moving receipt for what has been lost.

—Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, judge of the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize and author of Girl as Birch and Opinel

Review by poet Monica McAlpine

Horse  

My feet land on the ground     unsteadily  

so that each step unsettles me    even  

the central notion    of my spine    forgets itself 

before I mount    I am aware of the light  

before I mount    I try to take it in   the great warm compass of the animal  

sweet fermenting center    it is    against the partial collapsing  

staggers of the light    the only forthright thing  

the whole dark shape    a solid and  

an opening. 

Or should I start here?    Mama lifts me high    through the light  

higher still    then places me in front 

of her    so that    I inhale her with the coil of the animal    together. 

I rest against her    the animal against me    pressing my legs  

to the breathing hide    the commotion  

has receded    the sun lies down    in my warm and necessary flesh  

and then   we begin to move    Mama’s arms around me    crossing    bracing

I feel my body    and it is whole

I am arrested    blinking    in this new sensation    I let out  

a small starting     sound  

of recognition 

and when the horse moves    forward in the first instant    I find  

that I am already    accustomed    the rising    stirring    falling  

falling back    into the original 

I can recognize the heat    of the sun    the leaves gliding by  

my smoothing face    it is all  

as I assumed it would be    I have assumed it all 

there is a woman walking    beside the animal  

pleasant voice    syllables washing    in hair swaying  

in the ease of the sun 

He is there now too    running alongside 

I hear his voice    lower than the others    I can say  

his name too    purchase the shape of him    with my voice 

Dad-e-da    a big    thirsty shape  

the hum of him.  

When he touches me    he gives me his weight  

the certainty    of his grand voice  

he appears    above me    his face dividing when    he smiles

I am sitting on    the back of the horse    the warm moving back 

the tightening and slackening  

in the hinges of my hips    the rhythm beating  

through the pressure    of the hide 

I see clearly    I see my own unliquefied    extremities 

the length of my arm    ends  

in a hand    the length of my leg    ends  

in a foot    it is demonstrable  

and for this rare    uncompromised    moment 

I am secure    I cannot be deposed 

I am 

all the strong    unhurried length    of me 

I am Stella.  

Poems from “Receipt for Lost Words” have been published in Cincinnati Review 

(“Horse”), Mid-American Review (“The Walls Will Be Silenced When She Speaks”), Natural Bridge (“Hope”), Prairie Schooner, (“The Waiting Room”), and Slippery Elm (“Where Does the Fury Come From?”).

My new ekphrastic poem "Nude in an Interior," inspired by Pierre Bonnard, was published in The Ekphrastic Review.