Are we humans all one half of a whole being wandering around looking for their other half? This unanswered question is eternally begging to be addressed because most humans long to find their opposite, their compliment, to feel completed by the Other. Having lost her father to suicide before the age of two, Catherine felt a void. In her late teens she began the search for the missing part of herself. She observed a pattern that, for all her dreams of wanting to be sheltered, the men she encountered were not able to complete her. As the years have gone by, she has experienced the integration within herself, and is no longer searching. The richness of her current romantic experience increases now with reflection and age, solitude and vulnerability. These poems lay out her journey and reflect a lifetime of spirited curiosity. ''Catherine Ferguson writes with a painterly brush and she writes from the body. Each poem evokes a clear and translucent world, both sensual and ethereal. Her relationships with a horsetail swamp or a departed father or a man's waist are saturated with the light of her attention. Her poems are time capsules, original and stinging, and each one surprises. One can read these poems again and again with deep pleasure.'' --Anne Valley Fox, poet, author of Nightfall (Red Mountain Press, 2016). She and Ann Lacy are co-editors of five volumes of oral histories from the New Mexico Federal Writers' Project (Sunstone Press, 2010-1015). ''I'm on fire! Catherine Ferguson is on fire! She burns, swipes these pages with images of men who ignited her embers into flames, who dampened, almost smothered her flames, who left her alone in ashes. Here, she shares with us the sensuous, inextinguishable fire of a woman who loves the world of men, of trees, of animals--the kindling, the burning, the adventures of her loving and losing the men in her world. Have we not all experienced such joy and pain? Rejoice, no, praise, Catherine, for this gift!'' --Tom Lennox, poet, Sarasota, Florida, author of Aeriel Acts. Catherine Ferguson is a poet and painter living in Galisteo, New Mexico. Inspired by landscape, animals and the people she loves and has loved, she creates watercolors, oils, retablos and poems. She has written numerous chapbooks and has won two New Mexico Book Awards: one for poetry as co-author of The Sound a Raven Makes, and another for her retablo illustrations in You Who Make the Sky Bend by Lisa Sandlin. Catherine was born in Mexico City, where both of her parents were studying art. She grew up in Scottsdale, then Phoenix, attended the University of Arizona. In 1972 Catherine moved to New Mexico where she continues to write and paint.