Lola Haskins – författare

Lola Haskins takes readers on a tour like no other. Travelling to Florida’s most interesting cemeteries, she visits Napoleon’s nephew, tells the gruesome story of a man who dug up his love and lived with her for seven years, and even shares a murder mystery.Whether the final resting places of Civil War soldiers killed in battle or of the four-hundred-year-old remains of nuns peacefully interred by their shell-studded chapel, each plot has a unique story to tell. The 1918 flu epidemic, for example, comes alive in five graves behind a small white church overlooking the Santa Fe River: four children and their mother, dead within a week of each other.Each chapter features a substantial description of (and driving directions to) a particular location, an overview of the local community, and an extended profile of one of that cemetery’s most interesting ""residents."" Haskins also includes first-person reflections on mortality, on what it means to die and to grieve for the dead, and fact-filled discussions of changing burial practices and religious beliefs. She even visits a pet cemetery and a racehorse cemetery, sharing stories of a ghost dog and a horse that got a speeding ticket.

ConstellatedWhen the atoms in my bodyreturn to stars They will not rememberthis five amout my window,neither the moorasleep on the horizon,nor, across her darkened hips,the scattersof bright yellow gorse.

This book is about Latina identity, a timely subject in today's America. The author’s journey begins as she, full of love for Mexico and its culture despite her closest blood connection being her bisabuela, boards a bus. She starts out determined: “Yes foreign is a word for fear. Yes I am coming home.” But then, because “it is afraid, staying in a language where you were not born,” she retreats, hiding first behind we, then behind masks. But when it becomes clear that the masks are her true self, she loses her fear, and barrels ahead as I, fully committed, all the way to the end.

“Lola Haskins’s range is broad; her perceptions are always surprising. Natural objects surpass themselves and episodes of women’s history are rewritten in this lively, adventuresome collection.”—Maxine Kumin“ . . . Hunger is a cabinet of crystals each one with a cutting edge. It’s a wonder.”—Beloit Poetry Journal“She knows we are rooted to the earth but long for the stars. . . . And she’s wise enough to know that love searches us out. Dazzling.”—Northwest Arkansas Times“[The poems] richly present the experience of women, as the complexity of their material, emotional, and imaginative lives presses against the constraints of their assigned roles. . . wonderfully evocative.”—The Hudson Review“. . . Convincing and exquisitely visual. It plays off a painterly use of visualization and technique even as it enacts the limits of such artistry in the face of real feeling. . . . It is the clarity of Haskins’s poems and (her speakers’) observations, combined with the sometimes elegant, sometimes searing restraint with which the observations are made, that gives these poems their impact.”—Colorado Review

This book is about Latina identity, a timely subject in today's America. The author’s journey begins as she, full of love for Mexico and its culture despite her closest blood connection being her bisabuela, boards a bus. She starts out determined: “Yes foreign is a word for fear. Yes I am coming home.” But then, because “it is afraid, staying in a language where you were not born,” she retreats, hiding first behind we, then behind masks. But when it becomes clear that the masks are her true self, she loses her fear, and barrels ahead as I, fully committed, all the way to the end.

“Lola Haskins’s range is broad; her perceptions are always surprising. Natural objects surpass themselves and episodes of women’s history are rewritten in this lively, adventuresome collection.”—Maxine Kumin“ . . . Hunger is a cabinet of crystals each one with a cutting edge. It’s a wonder.”—Beloit Poetry Journal“She knows we are rooted to the earth but long for the stars. . . . And she’s wise enough to know that love searches us out. Dazzling.”—Northwest Arkansas Times“[The poems] richly present the experience of women, as the complexity of their material, emotional, and imaginative lives presses against the constraints of their assigned roles. . . wonderfully evocative.”—The Hudson Review“. . . Convincing and exquisitely visual. It plays off a painterly use of visualization and technique even as it enacts the limits of such artistry in the face of real feeling. . . . It is the clarity of Haskins’s poems and (her speakers’) observations, combined with the sometimes elegant, sometimes searing restraint with which the observations are made, that gives these poems their impact.”—Colorado Review