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Today's poem is "Christmas (1988)"
from Burn

Southern Illinois University Press

Sara Henning is the author of the poetry collections Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor's Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the 2019 Poetry Society of America's George Bogin Memorial Award. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Marshall University, where she coordinates the A.E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series.

Other poems by Sara Henning in Verse Daily:
September 22, 2024:   "Stealing Ariel" "What had I become the night I dreamed..."
August 21, 2019:   "Drunk Again, He Pushes Her" "If she falls this time, my grandmother..."

Other poems on the web by Sara Henning:
Three poems
Two poems
"Terra Firma"

Sara Henning's Website.

About Burn:

"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

"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

"'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



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