View from True North

by Sara Henning

Overview

Winner, High Plains Book Award Poetry, 2019

Winner, George Bogin Memorial Award, 2019

Finalist, Julie Suk Award, 2018

In these edgy poems of witness, Sara Henning’s speaker serves as both conduit and curator of the destructive legacies of alcoholism and multigenerational closeting. Considering the impact of addiction and sexual repression in the family and on its individual members, Henning explores with deft compassion the psychological ramifications of traumas across multiple generations.

With the starling as an unspoken trope for victims who later perpetuate the cycle of abuse, suffering and shame became forces dangerous enough to down airliners. The strands Henning weaves—violent relationships, the destructive effects of long-term closeting, and the pall that shame casts over entire lives—are hauntingly epiphanic. And yet these feverish lyric poems find a sharp beauty in their grieving, where Rolling Stone covers and hidden erotic photographs turn into talismans of regret and empathy. After the revelation that her deceased grandfather was a closeted homosexual “who lived two lives,” Henning considers the lasting effects of shame in regard to the silence, oppression, and erasure of sexual identity, issues that are of contemporary concern to the LGBTQIA community. Even through “the dark / earth encircling us,” Henning’s speaker wonders if there isn’t some way out of a place “where my body / is just another smoke-stung / dirge of survival,” if, in the end, love won’t be victorious.

Part eyewitness testimony, part autoethnography, this book of memory and history, constantly seeking and yearning, is full of poems “too brutal and strange to suffer / [their] way anywhere but home.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809336852
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	11/22/2018
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Sara Henning is the author of one other poetry book, A Sweeter Water. Her poems have appeared in Quarterly West, Witness, Passages North, Rhino, Meridian, and Cincinnati Review. In 2015, she won the Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize. She is a visiting assistant professor of English and creative writing at Stephen F. Austin State University.
 

Read an Excerpt

THE ART OF DROWNING

When her best friend feigned
her own drowning, her body

sinking as if ransomed by
water, my ten-year-old

mother dove after the luster
of bathing suit breaching

a tide too ready to swallow her,
blonde hair sleek as a jellyfish

pulsing in flotsam and milky
lacquer. The girl's laugh

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.
Years later, every lover exploiting

her water's lush vertigo
a lesson in spindrifts, sternways,

shells that sliver her toes.
Because I'm trickster,

heiress of disaster,
I'll learn to hold my breath

until I'm grit and glisten,
cull and foam. Until

like my mother, I confuse
love for mooring, not gravity's

tideward fidelity, not one
more ruthless pull.


DRUNK AGAIN, HE PUSHES HER

If she falls this time, my grandmother,
into the cluster of cacti she nursed from

blunt-cut pups, if she awaits her wounds
to callous like lobes nicked to stomata,

or spines scarring their way into woolen
areoles, she'll laugh until the sultry lure

of shame is beyond her. If the golden barrel
stems stake her flesh this time, purloining

through breach and bract, if they take
hours to pluck while flowers genuflect

from the crown of globes cresting loose
from pot to linoleum, spilling dirt in which

she's learned to rest her head, she'll coax
each deep-clenched thorn refusing closure

with her nails, its pulpy, fevered now.
If the woman-pain threading through the yard,

up the stairs, to the place she's fallen does
so by instinct now, the way that untamed,

it's learned to lay its body upon her, she'll use
the word accident, blame her German

shepherd's sweet-sly heft. And if somewhere
she's still falling, half-erect, half-floating,

if the alibi she learns to mouth is quilled
into her blood like a siren song, I'll say this

is how I'm falling, this is how I fell-gravity
my heirloom, my bluntly conjured flare.


THE DAY HE BECAME AN AURORA BOREALIS

When I call about my grandfather's
cerebral atrophy, my mother won't say
he's heaving his dinner plate

against the wall again, won't tell me
he's on his knees, palms full of potatoes,
crushing their lukewarm opulence

into the kitchen rug. Even when
clouds intercept a swirling nexus,
an aura of plasma haunts the dark,

a forbidden spectral emission.
So when I call about his hippocampal
hemorrhage, I don't expect her

to say he's wearing a diaper low
on his hips, that he's bivouacking
himself in the carport, stripping

off sweatpants, pointing at the sky.
She'll say he's fine. She'll say he's
the same, only I'll hear that his

glial cells are turning into subvisual
red arcs. That his axons are breaching
the next solar tempest. I'll listen

for how they're pelting the vista:
hitch of static, plasma luminescence,
her voice going dead on the line.

Table of Contents

First Murmuration 1

I

Camera Lucida 5

Rites of Passage: A Conditional 6

How I Learned I Had the Shine 8

For My Uncle, Who Learned to Fly 11

Marilyn 13

For My Sister, Miscarried 15

Other Planets, Other Stars 17

The Art or Drowning 19

My Life in Men 21

Song 23

Concordance for My Grandfather's Dementia 25

Drunk Again, He Pushes Her 26

Rain Elegy 28

Baptize Him in Dark Water 30

The Day He Became an Aurora Borealis 35

The Mandoline 36

II

The End of the Unified Field 41

The Truth of Them 47

My Grandfather's Suits 50

These Are Not Nice Birds 52

Through a Glass Darkly 55

Letter to My Grandfather, Who Lived Two Lives 57

Truths Only Starlings Will Speak 59

How to Pray 60

Fathers and Sons 62

The Things of the World Go on without Us 63

True North, a Retrospective 70

Notes 73

Acknowledgments 75

Editorial Reviews

"The opening poem pleads, 'Let me know heirloom / from hazard,' and that worry suffuses the book—that one man’s cruelty is the speaker’s true inheritance, psychologically and genetically. Perhaps in resistance to this unwanted lineage, Henning’s collection stitches together language from many others—Wallace Stevens, David Wojahn, Jorie Graham, even Bon Jovi, to name a few—which has the effect of creating a new lineage, a literary one, to supplant the curse of the other. It’s a rescuing, radical quality of poetry, and one of the reasons Henning’s poetic voice sings so vulnerably, so intrepidly."—Chelsea Wagenaar, Plume

"The poet revisits memories, probes traumatic moments with enviable objectivity offering tender forgiveness or issuing firm judgments on the self as the case may be. And while the locus of these lyrics is that of personal experience, the poems offer a powerful indictment of the culture of violence against, and degradation of, women surrounding the speaker. The poems deliver these psychological, social and political insights with a great deal of esthetic pleasure. We are quickly and powerfully drawn into the world of these poems and into the experiences of the speaker, and the by the end of our reading we find that traces of these experiences have lodged themselves within us, changing us. None of this powerful effect could have been achieved without the poet's choice and manipulation of language, which is always intuitive and surprising, creating word by word a group of poems that moves and enlightens." —Khaled Mattawa on Sara Henning

“Sara Henning’s poems search through the past and present, never turning an eye from the pain of loss: a grandfather’s death and a father’s suicide. Both family portrait and mirror, each poem is rendered with lyrical precision and quiet reverie as they present a scarred life, the wounds healing but not yet closed. The speaker here claims to be the ‘heiress of disaster,’ and though much of her inheritance is loss, she shapes it, poem by poem, into strength.”—Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men

“Sara Henning writes in the proud tradition of such contemporary masters as James Wright, Lorine Niedecker, and Stanley Plumly. Like them, she understands that the task of relating family history is sometimes indistinguishable from lamentation. Also like them, she situates her poems in the hardscrabble precincts of the rural Midwest, locales upon which she bestows a troubled grace—thanks to her formal elegance, her startling metaphors, and her dexterous command of narrative. View from True North is a grave and bracing debut, a collection of unusual promise.”—David Wojahn, author of For the Scribe

“The impeccable crafting, formal mastery, and literary intelligence of View from True North all function as a brave counterbalance to the harrowing material at its core. What shores up the valor of this book’s acute witnessing gaze is its language—lush, lustrous, hammered into archetype: ‘Jags of heat-whelmed ice too sultry / not to thieve through the specular reflection / spiral into a raid of light’—its language as quantum physics, zeroing in on tragedy at the atomic level, at the semiotic level, the tyrant’s ashes ‘a collage of signs enticing / the next great signifier.’ Henning’s ravishing music is in revolt against the trauma of the book’s narrative, just as her sonnet sequences provide the ballast of history, of virtuosity. Sara Henning, a ‘trickster,’ ‘an heiress of disaster,’ has composed a radical masterpiece.”—Diane Seuss, author of Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

From the Publisher