Author Description

Cathryn Hankla's Return to a Certain Region of Consciousness gathers recent poems with those culled from eleven previous volumes to reveal a mature poet and her journey through more than four decades of subjects, places, selves, and the challenging art of poetry. From moon shots to pandemic ambiguities, like a color wheel of approaches to poetry's mystery and meaning, this book's prose poems, strict syllabics, metrics, and nonce forms of the poet's making pull into a coherent whole, unified not by consistency but by the poet's perceptive imagination. A painter who began as a photographer and filmmaker, Hankla is at home in long poems or haiku, employing close observation, associative collaging-and spinning stories into talismans. This collection samples projects such as Galaxies and Last Exposures: A Sequence, as well as volumes of prose poems published twenty years apart and the several books between, telescoping backward to Hankla's earliest works, Afterimages, praised by William Stafford, and Phenomena, her prize winning launch from University of Missouri Press. The poet's preoccupations include travels, history, domestic life, childhood, family tragedy, love relationships, art, environmental and personal losses, while the complicated cultural backdrop of Appalachia together with its topography, flora, and fauna forms a through line, a fault line, and a heartline. Hankla remains a steadfast witness and guardian of the region that has shaped her. As Henry Taylor wrote, Hankla's poems drift from a recognizable world "through something like a beaded curtain" to evoke "several of the other worlds that are in this one."