A mentally challenged teen in a coma, a WWII veteran weighing his beliefs, an intersexed man anticipating a relationship, a single woman who has kissed far too many frogs, and a first grader suffering at the hands of a family friend. These are just a few of the unforgettable characters in Fortune Teller Miracle Fish, an innovative collection of stories from award-winning novelist and poet Cathryn Hankla. The figures in these stories struggle toward more truthful expressions of themselves, as outsiders whose dilemmas, emotions, and desires make them unmistakably human. As varied as they are vivid, they strive for closer connections of love and community. Through humor and understanding, Hankla intrepidly navigates the transitions that define them—unplanned pregnancy, divorce, death, and gender change, to name a few. Acutely attuned to her subjects’ inner landscapes, Hankla captures the full spectrum of human experience, from childhood to old age, with heart, rare skill, and nerve.
Humorous, quirky, and spiritually meditative by turns, Cathryn Hankla's prose poems move by associative leaps and take their inspirations from cultural and personal icons. A shadow narrative moors the collection in the perspective of a woman who survives a difficult childhood to eventually comprehend the paradoxes of adult life and whose journeys into her heritage bring her to a fuller realization of her place in the world. Travels to Prague and Paris, allusions to literary, spiritual, artistic, and political figures, local and familial lore -- all become ready touchstones for the revelation of feeling and reevaluations of identity and the nature of freedom. While recognizing the danger in exploration, Hankla takes pleasure in questioning the status quo and takes issue with those who sidestep emotional or intellectual adversities by affecting apathy. In the title poem, the huge cache of the Louvre is searched, not for the famed Mona Lisa or Egyptian antiquities, but in a metaphorical quest for something now forever lost -- a nation's collective naoveti, destroyed with Kennedy's assassination, from the gunman's nest in what was then the Texas School Book Depository. Intimate and unusual, amusing and moving, Texas School Book Depository is a truly wondrous offering.
Negative history is a legal term referring to decisions that have been overruled or questioned in some way by an appellate court. Cathryn Hankla’s Negative History alludes to such ambiguity in the domain of a more personal justice—as the title poem suggests: “Petals of morning/open in lucid order/opposed to the law.//Here is a question without an answer.” Through these enthralling poems, the reader enters spheres of history and emotion in which there are more often ironies to be observed than answers to be found or justice served. And yet what can be discovered through vivid visual detail, through the poet’s eye, can lift us from our reliance on the world’s determinations and into an appreciation of life’s mysteries. With the issues tackled in Negative History—individual and familial identity, cultural and emotional heritage—Hankla skillfully balances keenest loss with the gains some losses paradoxically make available (“Submerging yourself, you learned/to search the darkness”). This remarkable collection plumbs the depths of sexual and transcendent love (“Let me die trying to tell you/one word that might matter”) and summons from those murky realms the feral nature of strong emotions and of our own fears (“I have unearthed/enough emptiness to survive”). In Negative History, Hankla professes the power of love to carry us from “where the press of heat healed the split.”
Afterimages is a journey of the eye, what the eye observes and what the eye cannot forget. Cathryn Hankla writes, the world I inhabit is a visual question, marked by a balancing line of light on distant water, a mirror horizon. These poems balance the death of family members against the monologue of a woman who comes to life under the coroner’s knife. Memories of a life-saving class counterbalance the image of drowned lovers in the film Women in Love. Photography, painting, and film all figure as arts that the mind uses to transcend loss and that the memory uses as aids to preserve the lost. Hankla’s eye for detail—soft down between the shoulder blades of a young cousin, silvery waves in the hair of two aunts remembering their flapper days and displaying the braids they bobbed—is as immediate as a touch on the shoulder and as fascinating as light flickering on a movie screen. There is no such thing as perfect communication as our train whistles north through fields of broken pines that my eyes climb branch after broken branch to their needled widow’s walks. I look out over this landscape, panning through the movie it becomes, and my mind wanders until I see, more clearly than ever before, your faces. Each window frames a changing composition, sometimes my own face, that registers only as afterimage. Hankla’s poems are a changing composition of the dead and the living, of black and white challenged by the light falling on peach, plum, and green apple in a Vermeer painting. Ultimately, these poems offer us, in the poet’s words, “courage not to save / our best for bitter ends” and “strength / to repeat that this earth wouldn’t have us forget.”
In this powerful poetic sequence wrought of deft tercets, Cathryn Hankla navigates the slippery, ever-changing territory between art and life. The death of the poet's father by car accident is the focal event for the collection, and all the poems reflect the collision of the physical and transcendent. Whether describing the abandoned nest of a Carolina wren or the excavation of the Kennewick Man, Hankla sounds a muted grief in these lines. But with wit, channeled through language and rhythm, the poet keeps traveling forward: by car and by camel, from San Francisco to Spain, with many stops between. As she takes us with her, finally off the map into regions of the interior, we discover what is at once weighty and wondrous, like ghostly snapshots left behind in a camera: "Everything and everyone who have carried / Us to this place." Only Thyme I pull you out by the roots, fierce love, But you still smell of thyme and lemon. What were you thinking, to die Instead of wintering, after so many seasons Of spring shoots and new greening? Surely your gnarled, woody fibers Are more alive than they look. Yet after patient weeks of rain, nothing Grows except the cutting I potted, A woolly patch dwarfed by purple basil. Making space for new plants, I pull up Withered stems, baring your roots, and The scent runs through me, like music Pouring through a sieve Of consciousness, leaving only this. "Only Thyme" published in Last Exposures: A Sequence of Poems by Cathryn Hankla. Copyright 2004 by Cathryn Hankla. All rights reserved.
In poems of mature range and facility, Cathryn Hankla addresses with humor and wonder the many tensions we must battle in forging both relationships and the self amidst the weight of our collective history. She discovers likeness in seemingly disparate subjects - animal and human, seen and unseen, speech and silence, the pardoned and the condemned - applying the reason of the heart and spirit in a reconciliation of the many dissonances life presents. Always nimble, intelligent, and truthful, these poems speak to what is most elusive and yet most valuable in being human. Shade trees throw odd symmetries of shadow to damp ground, where she lays down her head, crown through the spine's knots, to the trap of incarnation. Teenaged boys mimic a crippled woman's stumbling gait, but at least they are laughing, I think, and we are safe, one woman asleep, one sentinel awake. I see her shift, my sleeping, younger self. Tangled in a cave of sleep, she lays her body on the body of the map, sinks stolid roots to Roman toads. Plowing straight and deep, she covers places where we failed each other, by cinder and maul, cannon, treaty, and marriage, covering towns whose names still wound the tongue,
Humorous, quirky, and spiritually meditative by turns, Cathryn Hankla's prose poems move by associative leaps and take their inspirations from cultural and personal icons. A shadow narrative moors the collection in the perspective of a woman who survives a difficult childhood to eventually comprehend the paradoxes of adult life and whose journeys into her heritage bring her to a fuller realization of her place in the world. Travels to Prague and Paris, allusions to literary, spiritual, artistic, and political figures, local and familial lore -- all become ready touchstones for the revelation of feeling and reevaluations of identity and the nature of freedom. While recognizing the danger in exploration, Hankla takes pleasure in questioning the status quo and takes issue with those who sidestep emotional or intellectual adversities by affecting apathy. In the title poem, the huge cache of the Louvre is searched, not for the famed Mona Lisa or Egyptian antiquities, but in a metaphorical quest for something now forever lost -- a nation's collective naoveti, destroyed with Kennedy's assassination, from the gunman's nest in what was then the Texas School Book Depository. Intimate and unusual, amusing and moving, Texas School Book Depository is a truly wondrous offering.
Negative history is a legal term referring to decisions that have been overruled or questioned in some way by an appellate court. Cathryn Hankla’s Negative History alludes to such ambiguity in the domain of a more personal justice—as the title poem suggests: “Petals of morning/open in lucid order/opposed to the law.//Here is a question without an answer.” Through these enthralling poems, the reader enters spheres of history and emotion in which there are more often ironies to be observed than answers to be found or justice served. And yet what can be discovered through vivid visual detail, through the poet’s eye, can lift us from our reliance on the world’s determinations and into an appreciation of life’s mysteries. With the issues tackled in Negative History—individual and familial identity, cultural and emotional heritage—Hankla skillfully balances keenest loss with the gains some losses paradoxically make available (“Submerging yourself, you learned/to search the darkness”). This remarkable collection plumbs the depths of sexual and transcendent love (“Let me die trying to tell you/one word that might matter”) and summons from those murky realms the feral nature of strong emotions and of our own fears (“I have unearthed/enough emptiness to survive”). In Negative History, Hankla professes the power of love to carry us from “where the press of heat healed the split.”
A mentally challenged teen in a coma, a WWII veteran weighing his beliefs, an intersexed man anticipating a relationship, a single woman who has kissed far too many frogs, and a first grader suffering at the hands of a family friend. These are just a few of the unforgettable characters in Fortune Teller Miracle Fish, an innovative collection of stories from award-winning novelist and poet Cathryn Hankla. The figures in these stories struggle toward more truthful expressions of themselves, as outsiders whose dilemmas, emotions, and desires make them unmistakably human. As varied as they are vivid, they strive for closer connections of love and community. Through humor and understanding, Hankla intrepidly navigates the transitions that define them—unplanned pregnancy, divorce, death, and gender change, to name a few. Acutely attuned to her subjects’ inner landscapes, Hankla captures the full spectrum of human experience, from childhood to old age, with heart, rare skill, and nerve.
In this powerful poetic sequence wrought of deft tercets, Cathryn Hankla navigates the slippery, ever-changing territory between art and life. The death of the poet's father by car accident is the focal event for the collection, and all the poems reflect the collision of the physical and transcendent. Whether describing the abandoned nest of a Carolina wren or the excavation of the Kennewick Man, Hankla sounds a muted grief in these lines. But with wit, channeled through language and rhythm, the poet keeps traveling forward: by car and by camel, from San Francisco to Spain, with many stops between. As she takes us with her, finally off the map into regions of the interior, we discover what is at once weighty and wondrous, like ghostly snapshots left behind in a camera: "Everything and everyone who have carried / Us to this place." Only Thyme I pull you out by the roots, fierce love, But you still smell of thyme and lemon. What were you thinking, to die Instead of wintering, after so many seasons Of spring shoots and new greening? Surely your gnarled, woody fibers Are more alive than they look. Yet after patient weeks of rain, nothing Grows except the cutting I potted, A woolly patch dwarfed by purple basil. Making space for new plants, I pull up Withered stems, baring your roots, and The scent runs through me, like music Pouring through a sieve Of consciousness, leaving only this. "Only Thyme" published in Last Exposures: A Sequence of Poems by Cathryn Hankla. Copyright 2004 by Cathryn Hankla. All rights reserved.
These poems balance the death of family members against the monologue of a women who comes to life under the coroner's knife. Afterimages is a journey of the eye, what the eye observes and what the eye cannot forget.
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