Burn (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry) - Softcover

Sara Henning (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809339285 ISBN 13: 9780809339280

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 2024

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Sara Henning is the author of Terra 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 as Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, Witness, Meridian, and the Cincinnati Review. She is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Marshall University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

STEALING ARIEL 

What had I become the night I dreamed   
I shot my mother’s Smith and Wesson pistol?  
I’d never held an oil-slick metal barrel,  
fingered the grip of a powerful god.   

I only dreamed I shot my mother’s pistol,  
but my aunt’s man told police I cased his Jeep.  
Seventeen, I’d never fingered the grip of a powerful god. 
Under his grin, his vowels are bitter sugar. 

He told the cop on call I cased his Jeep. 
Loosened a lug nut. Ice-picked his tire. 
Under his grin, his vowels are bitter sugar. 
She tried to kill my wife, he said. She’d kill. 

He said, She ice-picked my tire— 
His lies, stiff as gin in the morning.  
She tried to kill my wife, he said. She’d kill.  
He hated my mother, which meant he hated me.  

His lies, stiff as gin in the morning.  
Lights from the cop’s car glinted and burned.  
He hated my mother, which meant he’d hurt me.  
The cop looked at me like one of his daughters. 

Lights from the cop’s car glinted and burned.  
Last week, I’d stolen my mother’s copy of Ariel. 
The cop looked at me like one of his daughters. 
My aunt’s man said, Honey, your life is over.  

I thought of Sylvia Plath, her lines 
Your body. / Hurts me as the world hurts God. 
Your life is over, the cop said,  
if you call my station again.  

Your body. / Hurts me as the world hurts God. 
I’d never held an oil-slick metal barrel.  
If you call my station again, he said. 
What had I become that night? I dreamed. 

 

A BRIEF HISTORY OF LIGHT
 
They will always be love letters,
closed caption transcriptions unspooling across
the TV. My mother, hard of hearing,
 
watched her stories in silence.
Guiding Light, One Life to Live,
living room lit by two Tiffany lamps.
 
Deep-throated wisterias, peonies
etched against cream at the crown,
all of it cast sleek flames at the ceiling.
 
How many times did I stare into
a lampshade, its luster blunted through
coiled bronze wire and blown favrile,
 
the canopy of glass in rich charade
all night? Just like that, my knees dirt
-smeared again. Braid down my back,
 
I’m tilling mica from soil at recess,
swearing it would catch fire in my hands.
I imagined angels tunneling through
 
layers of earth, catching their wings
on oak roots, bricks, and those little wounds
lodging there, waiting for me
 
to dig them up with sticks. The way it
sieved light through its scratched surface,
nothing could compete, not the Goody’s
 
barrettes I’d spent whole hours unearthing
while other girls lost themselves in games
of freeze tag, not their tortoiseshell glare.
 
Queen of the hunt, I’d strut the cache
with me wherever I’d go. So when she died,
my mother, I grasped her lamps
 
as if I were pulling slivers of dirt-rough
mica from the earth, knowing their iridescence
could burn any house down.


[end of excerpt]

Edition details

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809339285
• ISBN 13: 9780809339280
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 94