Description
Book SynopsisThis poignant collection of masterful elegies centers on the revelatory ways in which the speaker reconciles love, loss, and grief’s legacy. Following her mother’s battle with colon cancer and her own crisis of meaning, Henning culminates the collection with her rediscovery of joy in life’s small moments.
Trade ReviewSara Henning’s
Terra Incognita opens with a dream, and the poems undo us the way dreams do, with imagery that is seared into our minds so completely we can’t shake it. I left this book reluctantly, a little dazed, and wanting to go back inside the world Henning created, "the sky dusk-raw," "the stars ‘moving braille."
Terra Incognita is a rare book of poems, and Henning is a rare talent. -- Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones and Goldenrod
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us knows until we reach it," Joan Didion once declared. Sara Henning crafts beautiful and protean music out of the terra incognita of motherlessness. The gallery of richly evoked lines and incidents suggests the poet is a dynamic, at-the-ready elegist for all she sees. "In the belly of every summer day is a god / taking its first breath, so I learn to call it praying, / my mother forsaking the AC for a grace called smoking / in the car." Yes, one of the book’s major triumphs is that Henning, with artful precision and a daughter’s utmost love, makes the vital woman who was her first window on the world count for the reader as well. -- Cyrus Cassells, 2021 poet laureate of Texas
In Sara Henning’s stunning elegies, the mundane sears and sparks, infused with the speaker’s fierce grief. These poems accelerate, their energetic lines and images fueled by Henning’s imaginative precision and a lyricism that pops with its verbs and trills, whether telling a story of a mare’s head thrust into the window of a Chevy Nova, or the loss of a baby, or a mother’s Dilaudid-induced hallucinations of violent abduction while dying of cancer. The poems of Terra Incognita are thrilling with their vibrancy and beauty in the face of loss. -- Rebecca Morgan Frank, author of Oh You Robot Saints!
In
Terra Incognita, Sara Henning gives us a passionate group of elegies for her mother and an equally intense set of odes to her marriage. The territory she explores may be unknown ground, as her title suggests, but the poet knows where she stands. At every turn these poems are totally imaginative, totally alive. -- Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry: Poems and Dailiness: Essays on Poetry
Table of ContentsI. Terra Inferna
Terra Inferna
Elegy with Saltwater Taffy
Queening
Mom’s Eggs
Elegy Beginning with the Birth of a Mountain
God of the Kitchen Window
French Fries
Smoking in the Car
Cancer
Here Be Dragons
II. Terra Incognita
Terra Incognita
Elegy for the Color Pink
Once, I Prayed in the Water
Woman in Flames
The Boy
God, You Are a Muscadine
Still Life with Smoke
Elegy with Blueberries
Death Buried the Daughter I Was
What the Time-Share Man at the Westgate Hotel Tried to Sell Me
III. Terra Nova
Terra Nova
IV. Terra Firma
Terra Firma
Last Stash
Traitor Angels
Mercy Villanelle
Elegy in the Shape of a River
Weather Haibun
They Call Her Mi Corazon
My Mother Comes Back as a Dragonfly
Cherishing
Winter Gazebo
Acknowledgments
Notes
