We’re excited that past contributor Sara Henning has a book forthcoming in 2022! Terra Incognita‘s poems trace a woman as she navigates her relationship with her mother and experiences life after loss. Each of the book’s four sections explores a different era of the daughter’s life as she tries to make sense of the world. Ultimately, Terra Incognita shows us how to find joy in some of life’s most heart-wrenching moments.
“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
Terra Incognita won the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and will be published by Ohio University Press. The book is available for pre-order now!
Sara’s poems have appeared in both Issue 11 and Issue 22. To stay up to date with her, visit her website or Twitter. Congratulations, Sara!
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