Love's Press

Love's Press is a handful of lighthearted love poems about the joys and romance of a long marriage, a playful outpouring of love and affection for a husband. Hopefully, there are many others in the world as lucky as Cathy Cain demonstrates in these poems.

Love's Press, by Cathy Cain, is a deeply personal, wonderfully sensual, and infinitely relatable testament to love- if you've been so fortunate to love and be loved for the better part of a lifetime. Cain's poetry weaves lyrical details of morning twilight sky, constellations and gravity, the "empty space that's receptive to your touch," with more down to earth details, such as long johns and beach chairs. "Hold on," she implores, "as we speed / through night's dark discordant din." Hold on, indeed! After reading Love's Press, you will want to slide down the couch to your love, curling in for a cuddle, or as Cain puts it, "schooning alongside as one."

-Ann Farley, author of Tell Her Yes

With these twenty-two poems, Cathy Cain creates a song of praise for a long marriage to a beloved husband. In one poem, his presence floods through her as mysteriously yet vividly "as light unseen." In another she maintains that he gives off "a shy light made more visible" by her "mortal dust." In yet another, his body is a sun, the very "shape of warmth." Be it unseen or shy or powerfully bright, the light he brings to her life illuminates each poem. This collection is a tribute to deep and sustaining love.

-Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita