Poetry. "Most nature writers are observers. Catherine Arra is part of nature. Her encounters with the deer in her backyard are more than simple observations. They are human-to-animal exchanges in which Arra and the animals learn to communicate with each other. Her sensitivity encourages Forest, the first deer she encounters, to trust Arra beyond its own fear of people through the simple medium of an apple. Arra's poignant relationship with Forest and the other deer offers a glimpse into the dangerous existence in which wild animals live. DEER LOVE is a book for lovers: lovers of poetry, lovers of deer and other animals, and lovers of a writer who has shared her big heart with us. She has also shared a generous number of photographs of her 'friends.'"--Zvi A. Sesling

Loving from the Backbone, is a collection of love poems and a little erotica. Catherine Arra's intent in gathering the poems, many of which were scattered throughout various notebooks and journals, is to celebrate the loving of everyday.

Poetry. The poems and short prose in Catherine Arra's WRITING IN THE ETHER were born from the connective tissue of memory, the bones of the past, and the spirit that insists not only upon seeing and remembering, but upon reconciling "the holy and the unholy" to embrace what is. Here is a story of a girl growing up in the 1960s with a mysteriously elusive mother, a second-generation immigrant father, and her immigrant grandparents living next door. At the center of the collection is a desire to reach back for clarity and continuity that becomes, in itself, an act of writing in the ether. Through an exploration into her own story, Arra invites each of us to go back and become "forever the sentinel" on the doorstep of our history, to find the sweetest joys, the most devastating betrayals, and in doing so, mark each with a cross, a prayer, and perhaps a poem, because, as Arra writes, "Love eats you, and this is the only way home."

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.

In a world rife with discord and discontent, frequently bound and blinded by technology, Catherine Arra turns our gaze to nature and the wild. The twenty-six poems in Tales of Intrigue & Plumage are insightful and meditative. Arra invites us to see anew, to feel and appreciate, and to regain a connection to nature and to ourselves. Her poems are rich with imagery, subtle in tone, and yet carry an edge, a sadness, a warning. In her distinctly soft, clear voice, Arra offers us the stillness of sight.

Women in Parentheses is a delightful, important, sexy, smart, and sassy collection of poems about women caught between the concrete and abstract, the real and imagined-confines, parentheses, sometimes cultural, psychological, sexual, or of their own making. Poet Catherine Arra possesses a confident woman's voice full of grace and generosity, strength and vulnerability. The women that inhabit these poems "step(s) on out" and "paint the town," wear red lipstick, even though the book doesn't dwell on the physical but sticks to substance. There is a sense of inclusiveness and universality for all women-portraits from every walk of life. The poet uses nostalgia/childhood to great effect with references to Barbie & Ken, Cinderella, Once Upon a Time princes, and she seems to do this effortlessly, without being overly sentimental or sacrificing the adult voice. From girls to wise older women, Arra looks at the ways in which women are squeezed into the circumstances and expectations of gender, how some live life there, while others dig escape tunnels or kick down walls.