Burn: Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Autor Sara Henningen Limba Engleză Paperback – 21 apr 2024
A lyrical meditation on time, survival, and merciful moments of joy
Sara Henning’s Burn draws readers deep into the moments that make us, focusing on instances of crisis and renewal to explore our relation to time and lived experience. In these poems, we follow a speaker as she works through the loss of young love, the death of her parents, marriage’s hardness and beauty, sexual assault, and the devastation of a pandemic—evolutions of trauma that fracture time and alter perception. Twinned with these extremes are shimmering manifestations of joy only an imperfect world can make possible.
Burn magnifies the way time leaves us both the victim and the victor of our realities. The blaze of her late-mother’s Tiffany lamps sends the speaker back to childhood, where she unearths mica from the schoolyard dirt. The devastation of an ecological crisis, the annihilating act of rape, and the unsolved disappearance of a caretaker all level the speaker’s world and upend her place in it, forcing her to reconstitute reality from what remains. In poems which summon the spirit of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, this collection walks through the physics of temporality as refracted through love, loss, and grief, so we better understand its effect on our lives. Through this insight, Henning introduces a new way of being in the world.
A work of advocacy and uplift, Burn shines with the vibrant possibilities of narrative lyric poetry as it forges a path from grief to hope.
Sara Henning’s Burn draws readers deep into the moments that make us, focusing on instances of crisis and renewal to explore our relation to time and lived experience. In these poems, we follow a speaker as she works through the loss of young love, the death of her parents, marriage’s hardness and beauty, sexual assault, and the devastation of a pandemic—evolutions of trauma that fracture time and alter perception. Twinned with these extremes are shimmering manifestations of joy only an imperfect world can make possible.
Burn magnifies the way time leaves us both the victim and the victor of our realities. The blaze of her late-mother’s Tiffany lamps sends the speaker back to childhood, where she unearths mica from the schoolyard dirt. The devastation of an ecological crisis, the annihilating act of rape, and the unsolved disappearance of a caretaker all level the speaker’s world and upend her place in it, forcing her to reconstitute reality from what remains. In poems which summon the spirit of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, this collection walks through the physics of temporality as refracted through love, loss, and grief, so we better understand its effect on our lives. Through this insight, Henning introduces a new way of being in the world.
A work of advocacy and uplift, Burn shines with the vibrant possibilities of narrative lyric poetry as it forges a path from grief to hope.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780809339280
ISBN-10: 0809339285
Pagini: 86
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 10 mm
Greutate: 0.14 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
Seria Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
ISBN-10: 0809339285
Pagini: 86
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 10 mm
Greutate: 0.14 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
Seria Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Notă biografică
Sara Henning is the author ofTerra Incognita and View from True North, which was chosen by Adrian Matejka as co-winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award. She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, the 2019 Poetry Society of America's George Bogin Memorial Award, a 2019 High Plains Book Award, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship. Her work has appeared in journals such asAlaska Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, Witness, Meridian, and theCincinnati Review. She is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Marshall University.
Extras
Blue
My year of firsts will always burn bright blue.
I start with Manic Panic, my boyfriend’s head in the kitchen sink.
We cruise in cars, Texaco Icees sweet between our knees.
My mother worked doubles and binge-watched soaps.
In the kitchen sink, I dye my boyfriend’s hair.
His name is Elijah, Hebrew for my God.
My mother worked doubles and binge-watched soaps.
I steal her menthols, nearly fail the SAT.
I date a boy named Elijah, Hebrew for my God.
We spend prom night in the back of his Chevy Astro.
He aced the SAT, helped me pass physics.
From him, I learn that heat is a measure of disorder.
We spend prom night in the back of his Chevy Astro,
back when home was a place I couldn’t love.
If heat is a measure of disorder, does time exist?
When we get bored, we wander the aisles at Revco.
Home is a city I could never love.
When Elijah’s stepbrother raped my friend, I blame myself.
When we get bored, we wander the aisles at Revco.
Back from Basic, he begs for her number. I ink it on his hand.
He raped my friend. I blame myself.
She’s married now. Her husband holds her at night.
Back from Basic, a ghost of a brother begs, inks his rage onto women.
She called me after, screaming into the phone.
I’m married now. My husband holds me at night.
Back then, we cruised in cars, Texaco Icees sweet between our knees.
When I call her number, I still hear her screaming.
My year of firsts will always burn bright blue.
When I Choose a Man
July is the season of backyard barbecues, slabs of ribs bone-down and sluicing,
citronella kissing through me like a mosquito’s sting. Around me, men flaunt
flip-flops and aloha shirts, their tank tops inked with sweat. They don’t resemble
men I chose years ago: the chef moving through me like he’s skinning a salmon
barehanded, his touch leaving me wound-naked, radiant as a cat in heat. I still
fantasize about the way a hip-shaped bottle of Malbec turned his lips the color
of my hunger. Or the railroad man who slow-danced me in snakeskin boots
to George Strait, his cocktail of Stetson and greased-up Levi’s still deep in my
sheets. When I choose a man, he will have scarred his hands working quarry to
put himself through college, ghosts of calluses still churning in his palms. When
I choose a man, he will have our children, unborn, lurking in his blood. He will
angle his head in my lap and, half asleep, whisper—I am home.
*
Love erases youth,
that ephemeral wreck. O
husband, take me home.
Cat State
It’s true, my mother-in-law said. The boys
from Carthage High School came with their guns.
The biology class project was to dissect a cat,
to learn the structure of an animal’s organs.
A girl from class offered up her family’s barn
ferals, mousers who mated in the piss-striped rafters,
fur mangled by fights and wood ticks. It took
the boys an hour to shoot, then load the bodies
into the cargo bed of a borrowed farm truck,
drive to the high school where the teacher waited
to skin and tag them. The girl who offered them
didn’t know her pet tom was in the barn
that morning, called by hunger or the queens
in heat. But she knew him, naked, splayed ventral,
his islands of muscle sheathed under skin.
I imagine boys, oblivious, teacher dismissing
the rest of class, girl cradling what was left
of her heart in a towel. As she told this story,
my mother-in-law, she laughed the laugh
of a woman whose father found cattle dead
in the winter switchgrass, who knew what
it meant when locusts come. In physics
class, years ago, while I struggled to calculate
the speed of light, I’d think of Schrödinger—
boxed cat, poison flask, radioactive atom.
I didn’t know what it meant when my teacher
said radioactivity is a quantum process,
that a cat could be both alive and dead.
The experiment, he said, is theoretical, a study
in superposition. But I can’t stop thinking
about the cat hissing in the dark, spraying
urine in sleek arcs. How it must bunt its head
until blood comes, slash through wood
with its claws. I wanted to ask my teacher
to chalk the equation of survival onto
the board. I want to know if the cat ran
from the high school boys or if, purring,
he rubbed his haunches against their knees.
The girl, I’m still falling into her story—
my hands, wood-blistered, circle a shovel.
I plant the cat in the soil like a field
of pasqueflower, dark lavender flaring after
months of ice. In my dreams, it blooms
like anything loved enough to live again.
[end of excerpt]
My year of firsts will always burn bright blue.
I start with Manic Panic, my boyfriend’s head in the kitchen sink.
We cruise in cars, Texaco Icees sweet between our knees.
My mother worked doubles and binge-watched soaps.
In the kitchen sink, I dye my boyfriend’s hair.
His name is Elijah, Hebrew for my God.
My mother worked doubles and binge-watched soaps.
I steal her menthols, nearly fail the SAT.
I date a boy named Elijah, Hebrew for my God.
We spend prom night in the back of his Chevy Astro.
He aced the SAT, helped me pass physics.
From him, I learn that heat is a measure of disorder.
We spend prom night in the back of his Chevy Astro,
back when home was a place I couldn’t love.
If heat is a measure of disorder, does time exist?
When we get bored, we wander the aisles at Revco.
Home is a city I could never love.
When Elijah’s stepbrother raped my friend, I blame myself.
When we get bored, we wander the aisles at Revco.
Back from Basic, he begs for her number. I ink it on his hand.
He raped my friend. I blame myself.
She’s married now. Her husband holds her at night.
Back from Basic, a ghost of a brother begs, inks his rage onto women.
She called me after, screaming into the phone.
I’m married now. My husband holds me at night.
Back then, we cruised in cars, Texaco Icees sweet between our knees.
When I call her number, I still hear her screaming.
My year of firsts will always burn bright blue.
When I Choose a Man
July is the season of backyard barbecues, slabs of ribs bone-down and sluicing,
citronella kissing through me like a mosquito’s sting. Around me, men flaunt
flip-flops and aloha shirts, their tank tops inked with sweat. They don’t resemble
men I chose years ago: the chef moving through me like he’s skinning a salmon
barehanded, his touch leaving me wound-naked, radiant as a cat in heat. I still
fantasize about the way a hip-shaped bottle of Malbec turned his lips the color
of my hunger. Or the railroad man who slow-danced me in snakeskin boots
to George Strait, his cocktail of Stetson and greased-up Levi’s still deep in my
sheets. When I choose a man, he will have scarred his hands working quarry to
put himself through college, ghosts of calluses still churning in his palms. When
I choose a man, he will have our children, unborn, lurking in his blood. He will
angle his head in my lap and, half asleep, whisper—I am home.
*
Love erases youth,
that ephemeral wreck. O
husband, take me home.
Cat State
It’s true, my mother-in-law said. The boys
from Carthage High School came with their guns.
The biology class project was to dissect a cat,
to learn the structure of an animal’s organs.
A girl from class offered up her family’s barn
ferals, mousers who mated in the piss-striped rafters,
fur mangled by fights and wood ticks. It took
the boys an hour to shoot, then load the bodies
into the cargo bed of a borrowed farm truck,
drive to the high school where the teacher waited
to skin and tag them. The girl who offered them
didn’t know her pet tom was in the barn
that morning, called by hunger or the queens
in heat. But she knew him, naked, splayed ventral,
his islands of muscle sheathed under skin.
I imagine boys, oblivious, teacher dismissing
the rest of class, girl cradling what was left
of her heart in a towel. As she told this story,
my mother-in-law, she laughed the laugh
of a woman whose father found cattle dead
in the winter switchgrass, who knew what
it meant when locusts come. In physics
class, years ago, while I struggled to calculate
the speed of light, I’d think of Schrödinger—
boxed cat, poison flask, radioactive atom.
I didn’t know what it meant when my teacher
said radioactivity is a quantum process,
that a cat could be both alive and dead.
The experiment, he said, is theoretical, a study
in superposition. But I can’t stop thinking
about the cat hissing in the dark, spraying
urine in sleek arcs. How it must bunt its head
until blood comes, slash through wood
with its claws. I wanted to ask my teacher
to chalk the equation of survival onto
the board. I want to know if the cat ran
from the high school boys or if, purring,
he rubbed his haunches against their knees.
The girl, I’m still falling into her story—
my hands, wood-blistered, circle a shovel.
I plant the cat in the soil like a field
of pasqueflower, dark lavender flaring after
months of ice. In my dreams, it blooms
like anything loved enough to live again.
[end of excerpt]
Cuprins
CONTENTS
1.
Galveston, Texas
Stealing Ariel
Good Kissing
A Brief History of Fathers
Letter in the Shape of a Banyan Tree
Ghost Story
Blue
Cornfield Elegy
A Brief History of Light
Almost Men
Ars Poetica After an Abnormal Mammogram
Olives
Year of the Horse
2.
A Brief History of Fire
3.
The Virgin’s Club
When I Choose a Man
Cairns at School House Beach
Cat State
Texas Duplex
Meditation at Panda Express
Christmas Quarantine
After Uri
A Brief History of Hurricanes
A Brief History of Skin
Drive-In Nights
The First Years
Men of the Sea
Burn
Acknowledgments
Notes
1.
Galveston, Texas
Stealing Ariel
Good Kissing
A Brief History of Fathers
Letter in the Shape of a Banyan Tree
Ghost Story
Blue
Cornfield Elegy
A Brief History of Light
Almost Men
Ars Poetica After an Abnormal Mammogram
Olives
Year of the Horse
2.
A Brief History of Fire
3.
The Virgin’s Club
When I Choose a Man
Cairns at School House Beach
Cat State
Texas Duplex
Meditation at Panda Express
Christmas Quarantine
After Uri
A Brief History of Hurricanes
A Brief History of Skin
Drive-In Nights
The First Years
Men of the Sea
Burn
Acknowledgments
Notes
Recenzii
“When the embers of a blaze drift upward over the spindrifts of a churning time, we receive Henning’s language in curlicues of smoke. The poems in Burn meditate on what comes after the ash, pondering how we must have moved forward with our hands extended outward into the miracle of the open air. Her splendid lyrical words return us again and again to the clearing where somehow, despite it all, we are still able to breathe.”—Oliver de la Paz, author of The Diaspora Sonnets
“In Burn, Sara Henning risks adding the heat of recall and imagination to a life tindered by loss and trauma, and the result is poetic illumination. Across sobering backdrops of fear and uncertainty, as time applies its own pressurization to danger and desire, Henning shows how belief and love can abide. Burn is a book of reckoning and revel, is a healing.”—Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler
“‘Memory guts me open,’ Sara Henning writes in her dazzling new collection Burn. In these poems, burning is violence, it is grief, but it is also love and longing and desire. Henning explores a world ‘on the verge/of ending,’ under threat of floods, ice storms, and fires, a world in which men do violence to women’s bodies and beloved mothers die. With gorgeous formal innovation, including a sestina, pantoum, haibun and a crown of sonnets, these poems look unflinchingly at love and danger. Fire causes damage here but also reveals a new language, as the speaker finds joy and delight in new love—‘we are flameless combustion, licked flint, / divine red.’”—Nicole Cooley, author of Of Marriage
“In Burn, Sara Henning risks adding the heat of recall and imagination to a life tindered by loss and trauma, and the result is poetic illumination. Across sobering backdrops of fear and uncertainty, as time applies its own pressurization to danger and desire, Henning shows how belief and love can abide. Burn is a book of reckoning and revel, is a healing.”—Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler
“‘Memory guts me open,’ Sara Henning writes in her dazzling new collection Burn. In these poems, burning is violence, it is grief, but it is also love and longing and desire. Henning explores a world ‘on the verge/of ending,’ under threat of floods, ice storms, and fires, a world in which men do violence to women’s bodies and beloved mothers die. With gorgeous formal innovation, including a sestina, pantoum, haibun and a crown of sonnets, these poems look unflinchingly at love and danger. Fire causes damage here but also reveals a new language, as the speaker finds joy and delight in new love—‘we are flameless combustion, licked flint, / divine red.’”—Nicole Cooley, author of Of Marriage
Descriere
In these poems, we follow a speaker as she works through the loss of young love, the death of her parents, marriage’s hardness and beauty, sexual assault, and the devastation of a pandemic—evolutions of trauma that fracture time and alter perception. Twinned with these extremes are shimmering manifestations of joy only an imperfect world can make possible.