Burn

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.

“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

• CONTENTS1.Galveston, TexasStealing ArielGood KissingA Brief History of FathersLetter in the Shape of a Banyan TreeGhost StoryBlueCornfield ElegyA Brief History of LightAlmost MenArs Poetica After an Abnormal MammogramOlivesYear of the Horse2.A Brief History of Fire3.The Virgin’s ClubWhen I Choose a ManCairns at School House BeachCat StateTexas DuplexMeditation at Panda ExpressChristmas QuarantineAfter UriA Brief History of HurricanesA Brief History of SkinDrive-In NightsThe First YearsMen of the SeaBurnAcknowledgmentsNotes