The Found Object Imagines a Life: New and Selected Poems
(Cornerstone Press, 2022)

This 111-poem collection is made of the following six sections:
Stories to Misremember acknowledges the urge to nostalgically mis-remember troubling events and troubled people in order to remember what matters most . . . human love. This section of the collection is a study of a family on the High Plains struggling to support each other in times of great loss.
Spelunking for Persephone is a poetic journey through the craggy Rocky Mountains I have climbed. Focused on the mythic underworld figure of Persephone and a contemporary human beguiled by her, the poems of this section explore the metaphoric cracks and fissures of human love.
Surprising the God of Motion is a poetic meditation on the natural godly forces that securely ground us even as they toss us into rocky territory, that complicated landscape inside us, that strange wilderness where we have to face who we truly are.
Earning Apocalypse is concerned with the possibility of massive species collapse in the Anthropocene. I use the concept of “apocalypse,” with its ancient meanings of “revealed knowledge” and “portal into transformation,” to examine Planet Earth’s current biological and spiritual distress.
The Untamed Grave of Us section exposes a troubled love relationship, one marked by doubt and unmet needs. The poems reveal a love bond that endures though the relationship has failed, and the speaker of the poems experiences serenity, even joy, in the relationship’s "syntax of desire."
The Found Object Imagines a Life explores experiences of the other sections through self-conscious (meta) language. These "embodied-experience" poems are my attempt at creating actual lived experience within the phrasing and sentence patterns of self-conscious poems, which I hope retain the qualities of celebration and wonder that are part of the human process of living in and through language.

Some Gods Don’t Need Saints
(Finishing Line Press, 2016)

A semifinalist in the 2015 New Women's Voices Chapbook Competition, this chapbook was released by Finishing Line Press in March 2016. Some Gods Don’t Need Saints speaks of the many ways in which humans interact with Divinity. Here’s what poet and biographer Margaret Rozga says of the collection: “With elegantly spare language Mary Catherine Harper rethinks, examines, and removes underpinnings of commonly held ideas about what is good, what holy, what makes us whole and wholly at peace with all the natural world.” Howard McCord, internationally-recognized poet and fiction writer, says “Mary Catherine Harper has written a brilliant and moving book honoring the old gods, who, if forgotten by most and seldom nourished by an invocation or an honorific nod, still attend all our doings carefully. They are eternally patient with the errors humans make trying to understand the spider's track, or the heft of a stone face held in a wondering hand.”