Bøger af Cathryn Hankla

Cathryn Hankla's first novel is an engaging coming-of-age story set in the small Appalachian mining town of Poorwater, Virginia. It is the summer of 1968, and the narrator, inquisitive ten-year-old Dorie Parks, is getting ready to enter fifth grade when her errant older brother Willie returns to town. A religious fanatic and suspected drug user, Willie represents to the residents of Poorwater the hippie counterculture that threatens their conservative town, and his return is the catalyst for a string of strange and sometimes tragic events. Dorie's father, a miner, begins a dangerous labor rights crusade after a mining accident leaves a close friend dead. Dorie struggles to understand the class differences that separate "holler kids" and trailer park children like herself from her wealthy friend Betty. Hankla's graceful writing evokes the wonder and growing sophistication of a young girl on the verge of adolescence and an unknown future. A Blue Moon in Poorwater offers a moving yet unsentimental slice of life in Appalachian, Virginia.

In this powerful poetic sequence wrought of deft tercets, Cathryn Hankla navigates the slippery, ever-changing territory between art and life. The death of the poet's father by car accident is the focal event for the collection, and all the poems reflect the collision of the physical and transcendent.

Negative history is a legal term referring to decisions that have been overruled or questioned in some way by an appellate court. Cathryn Hankla's poems allude to such ambiguity in the domain of a more personal justice, as the title poem suggests: "Petals of morning/open in lucid order/opposed to the law.//Here is a question without an answer."

Humorous, quirky, and spiritually meditative by turns, Cathryn Hankla's prose poems move by associative leaps and take their inspirations from cultural and personal icons. Intimate and unusual, amusing and moving, Texas School Book Depository is a truly wondrous offering.

A journey of the eye, what the eye observes and what the eye cannot forget. These poems balance the death of family members against the monologue of a woman who comes to life under the coroner's knife. Memories of a life-saving class counterbalance the image of drowned lovers in the film Women in Love.