In John Hodgen’s poem, “American Airlines,” the traveling service is portrayed as a metaphor for how one person comes and goes, how one person can easily find new ground and get lost just as quickly, and how traveling can remind us of the end of one's life destination. I see this poem as a gate of travel between life and death, but also as opening up the possibility of finding new ground for the exploration of life and a new means of recovery for someone who is in need of healing. I admire this book for the way Hodgen acknowledges the world’s potential for both noble suffering but also joy.
Johnny Villacis
An abundance of concrete imagery and depth of reflection characterizes Kathleen O’Toole’s extraordinary collection This Far. Her poems reflect the deep relationships of her life, the experience of loss and death, and her encounters in world travel bringing to the reader the complexity of the human condition with its striving for meaning through her writing. Some poems made me laugh; others, cry. Her tributes to her late father were especially touching. There is one excerpt from her poem, “From Birdsong,” which she wrote for her mother that stuck with me: “Today a naturalist spoke of the risk that birds take / just to sing, revealing themselves to predators. / So when you hear a bird sing, she must have / something important to say. These days / when my mother speaks of Dad’s death, she says: / We thought we had at least another year.” She ends this poem with something her mother had said, “I have so much to live, so much to say.” I had never thought of birds risking their lives just to sing and how much we waste ours not saying something out of fear. The poems within this book do that; they make us think in ways we probably wouldn’t normally have, and this quality is consistent throughout the book. This Far shows us “how far” O’Toole has come in life. She has an amazing capability to pull the reader into her poems and connect with them even if readers never experienced what she has.
Keyla Crespo
Andalusian Hours is a book that looks at Flannery O’Connor’s biography via poems. The book is structured with every poem beginning with an epigraph using O’Connor’s own words. These poems show us O’Connor’s love, fear and struggles through the imagined voice of O’Connor herself.
One of O’Connor’s biggest fears was to be an orphan, as stated in the epigraph of “Flannery’s Fear”: “I have at least been an Imaginary orphan and that was probably my first view of hell,” a quote taken from The Habit of Being. She lost her father, which was very hard for her, but knowing that her mother was mortal and she could lose her too made it worse. In the poem itself, O’Donnell shows O’Connor’s feelings of fear:
When my father died I could not bear
the grief that fell on me like hard hard rain.
But that was nothing next to the fear-
ful knowing my mother was mortal, too.
One of my favorite poems is “Flannery’s Misfit.” O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus since she was 25 years old, and this disease ended up taking her life at 39. It is interesting that her biggest fear wasn’t death knowing it would come earlier. She took this news and got stronger. In this poem O’Donnell shows O’Connor thinking through this tough time.
I’ve yet to meet any living soul
whose disposition wouldn’t be
improved by a sit-down with brother death.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Same goes for me. I’m dyin’ every day.
Sickness my Misfit. I won’t grow old
so I need to get wise the fast way.
These lines show that the emotions she felt toward death are not fear and not even resignation exactly, but perseverance: she felt she needed to learn faster to be able to live because she wasn’t going to be able to grow old and really experience life.
Andres Terrero
Luke Hankins’ Radiant Obstacles shows us an intelligent grappling with the conundrums of belief in heaven; its poems, inquiries that frequently center around our separation from the “radiant” and from “beauty” more than our closeness to it. And yet it is also a collection that is not cynical in the process of this inquiry. My favorite poem, “Meditation,” invites us to examine the experience of touching someone we love, that someone being separate from us, but close as well:
When we touch, it is the touch of a Thing
to an idea. I am obliterated, but reborn
in Your melting, an image of what is above me
in what is beyond me.
You are. Therefore, in a small way, I am.
In this poem, something physical can be imagined in other ways as we start to see it for what it is. Being with someone we love reminds us of how our own existence, our own being, is also dependent upon the existence of a being “above” or “beyond” us.
Hankins has an amazing eye for what could be and what is there.
Anastasia Anderson
Jeanine Hathaway’s Long After Lauds is a book that focuses on her journey through life formed by Catholic prayers of praise yet struggling with her faith as well. The book takes the reader on unexpected journeys, moments of self-discovery and periods of self-reflection. In “Attending To Remains,” the speaker reflects upon a skull that forensic science has “scrub[bed]” clean as “ivory” and imagines how
. . . . . . . . . A carver could scratch his own head
and etch the story inside this bowl of bone
with stick figures like thoughts: a girl giving up
everything to live here. . . .
Hathaway’s lines here powerfully lead readers to reflect upon how the life of a human being is so valuable and precious. Science reminds us that at the end of the day we are all just bones and flesh, but as humans we know there is a story within every human life, and we long to preserve it. In this poem, Hathaway captures the beauty, complexity and short-lived memory of a human life.
During this hard time of adjusting to remote living and learning, I feel as though this book brought me spiritual guidance in ways that I did not expect.
Leal Almodovar