Our heartfelt congratulation go to previous contributor Sara Henning, for the success of Burn, her 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection. The collection will be published on April 22 by Southern Illinois University Press. It is available for preorder now! Want to see Sara live? Her reading tour can found on her website, with events on April 19th, 23rd, 25th, 26th, and beyond!
A word from the author: “My journey of writing Burn began after my mother lost her battle with cancer in 2016. Struggling to make sense of time and its role in our lives, I found solace in the words of poet Delmore Schwartz:
What will become of you and me (This is the school in which we learn ...) Besides the photo and the memory? (... that time is the fire in which we burn.)
“Through these poems, I invite readers to consider how we navigate our own flames—do we burn up? Do we ignite with joy or ecstasy? Do we rise like a phoenix from its ashes?”
Burn magnifies the way time leaves us both the victim and the victor of our realities. The blaze of her late mother’s Tiffany lamps sends the speaker back to childhood, where she unearths mica from the schoolyard dirt. The devastation of an ecological crisis, the annihilating act of rape, and the unsolved disappearance of a caretaker all level the speaker’s world and upend her place in it, forcing her to reconstitute reality from what remains. In poems which summon the spirit of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, this collection walks through the physics of temporality as refracted through love, loss, and grief, so we better understand its effect on our lives. Through this insight, Henning introduces a new way of being in the world.
Burn has already received glowing reviews:
“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
You can read her poem “Immortelles (2016),” in Issue 32. She has also five poems published in Issue 22. And three in Issue 11.
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. You can find out more about Sara on her website.
