Galaxies - Softcover

Hankla, Cathryn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0881466166 ISBN 13: 9780881466164

Publisher: Mercer University Press, 2021

Synopsis

As the opening poem "The Labyrinth Galaxy" suggests, this is not a book of astronomy, but a book of seeking and beseeching. Cathryn Hankla's GALAXIES forms a collective of connected but disparate things. Each galaxy grouping constitutes a gravitational system of concern, finding its own music and approach to what a poem can be. Together the poems create a spiritual pilgrimage, a sequence sending up an alarm for the earth, inviting the reader to walk a path to the heart's center.

As attentive to the natural world as to human emotion, Hankla has previously written prose poems and lineated verse in traditional and open forms, but in this inventive volume she allows each poem to follow its own trajectory, map its own metaphorical universe--to reveal the extraordinary range under this poet's command. Hankla shifts through high and low registers, in a voice droll and urgent by turns, always observant and skillful at her craft.

About this title

About the Author:

Born in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, Cathryn Hankla is department chair and professor of English in the Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University. She serves as Poetry editor of The Hollins Critic. Hankla has published twelve previous books of fiction and poetry, including FORTUNE TELLER MIRACLE FISH and GREAT BEAR.

Review:

"You will meet your god in the present moment," Cathryn Hankla writes, and her poems, emanating from that promise, contemplate and honor the largest questions. The multiverse of this quietly mind-blowing book is composed of imagined constellations. The timeframe expands from antiquity to the present; the diurnal braids with the eternal; macro and micro are intertwined. But Hankla also understands the power of fragments, whether archeological or linguistic. She meditates on temporal constructs--after, when, until--considers the where of space, and mourns the planet's transience in poems that address creaturely mortality and the loss of ecosystems. The poignancy is sharpened by a devastating irony, for GALAXIES is a brave book, both canny and infinitely curious. The poems navigate the tangles of family, DNA's braid of connectedness, while giving voice to loneliness, romantic love, and the mysteries of luck. There's a profound delicacy throughout, a candor tempered by compassion. Reticence has seldom seemed so provocative or quietude so dazzling. --Alice Fulton, author of BARELY COMPOSED, MacArthur Fellow

In Cathryn Hankla's GALAXIES, one cannot escape the influence of the stars. The stars followed lead us often astray into the unexpected, the wonderful, the off-kilter, and the strange. If fate is a road followed, it is full of switchbacks, dangerous curves, washed-out roads, detours, and dead ends. But what a journey Hankla takes us on. --Eric Pankey, author of CROW-WORK

About this edition

• Publisher: Mercer University Press
• Publication date: 2021
• ISBN 10: 0881466166
• ISBN 13: 9780881466164
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 78