I’m an alibi / for salvage,” Sara Henning proclaims in Garden Effigies. The creatures – human and otherwise – who inhabit these poems are “singed by intimacy” and “stunned by entanglement /or paradox.” This poet’s alibis are not denials of presence or involvement, but explorations of how the stories we salvage can be transformed into songs, murmurations, “the most usable truth(s).”
Grace Bauer, author of Nowhere All At Once
“Instead of paradox, / I’ll horde light, willow bark’s / sap-ridden tenderness,” states the speaker of “Pliancy” in Sara Henning’s haunting new chapbook, Garden Effigies. Henning’s poems whisper secrets to their readers, and impress with their use of both prose lines and deft lyrical stanzas. The characters of this collection inhabit a world of strangeness, desire, and wonder, confronting various types of peril and examining them with a cool eye. Garden Effigies reminds us that chapbooks can be the most powerful collections of poetry: intense, provocative, and surprising at every turn.
--Mary Biddinger, author of A Sunny Place with Adequate Water
Sara Henning is the author of A Sweeter Water (Lavender Ink, 2013), as well as two chapbooks, Garden Effigies (Dancing Girl Press, 2015) and To Speak of Dahlias (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Crazyhorse, Quarterly West, Green Mountains Review, Crab Orchard Review, and RHINO. Winner of the 2015 Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, she is currently a doctoral student in English and Creative Writing at the University of South Dakota, where she serves as assistant managing editor for the South Dakota Review, assistant editor of Rogue Agent, and as associate editor of Sundress Publications. Please visit her at her electronic home at http://www.sarahenning.net/
THE ART OF DROWNING, THE ART OF WAR
When her girlfriend
pretended to be ransomed
by water, my ten-year-old
mother dove after
the luster of bathing suit
breaching a reckless
tide, blonde hair sheening
like a jellyfish pulses
in flotsam and milky lacquer.
The girl’s laugh
like a cleaving oyster.
My mother still under her,
spitting up shame and spume.
Every unburied delta
that moved through her body
became a torrent
disgracing her starboard.
Every lover exploiting her
water’s plush vertigo, a lesson
in spindrifts, sternways,
shells that sliver her toes.
Like her, I’ll learn to hold
my breath until I’m grit
and glitter, cull and foam.
Until I confuse love
for mooring, the horizon’s
tide-ward fallowness,
not one more ruthless pull.