BURN
“When the embers of a blaze drift upward over the spindrifts of a churning time, we receive Henning’s language in curlicues of smoke. The poems in Burn meditate on what comes after the ash, pondering how we must have moved forward with our hands extended outward into the miracle of the open air. Her splendid lyrical words return us again and again to the clearing where somehow, despite it all, we are still able to breathe.” —Oliver de la Paz, author of The Diaspora Sonnets
Selected by Allison Joseph as a 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection
Debuts April 2024!
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About BURN
Poems by Sara Henning
A lyrical meditation on time, survival, and merciful moments of joy
Burn magnifies the way time leaves us both the victim and the victor of our realities. Drawing readers deep into the moments that make us, focusing on instances of crisis and renewal to explore our relation to time and lived experience, these poems follow a speaker through the loss of young love, the death of her parents, marriage’s hardness and beauty, sexual assault, and the devastation of a pandemic. Each evolution of trauma fractures time and alters perception— alongside shimmering manifestations of joy only an imperfect world can make possible.
The blaze of her late-mother’s Tiffany lamps sends the speaker back to childhood, where she unearths mica from the schoolyard dirt. The devastation of an ecological crisis, the annihilating act of rape, and the unsolved disappearance of a caretaker all level the speaker’s world and upend her place in it, forcing her to reconstitute reality from what remains. In poems which summon the spirit of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, this collection walks through the physics of temporality as refracted through love, loss, and grief, so we better understand its effect on our lives.
A work of advocacy and uplift, Burn shines with the vibrant possibilities of narrative lyric poetry as it forges a path from grief to hope.
Available Here!
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Advance Praise for burn
“In Burn, Sara Henning risks adding the heat of recall and imagination to a life tindered by loss and trauma, and the result is poetic illumination. Across sobering backdrops of fear and uncertainty, as time applies its own pressurization to danger and desire, Henning shows how belief and love can abide. Burn is a book of reckoning and revel, is a healing.”
—Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler
“‘Memory guts me open,’ Sara Henning writes in her dazzling new collection Burn. In these poems, burning is violence, it is grief, but it is also love and longing and desire. Henning explores a world ‘on the verge/of ending,’ under threat of floods, ice storms, and fires, a world in which men do violence to women’s bodies and beloved mothers die. With gorgeous formal innovation, including a sestina, pantoum, haibun and a crown of sonnets, these poems look unflinchingly at love and danger. Fire causes damage here but also reveals a new language, as the speaker finds joy and delight in new love—‘we are flameless combustion, licked flint, / divine red.’”
—Nicole Cooley, author of Of Marriage
Reviews
“The work in Burn is raw and searing. The themes are relatable to most, but there is an overtone of overcoming darkness that is especially thrilling in these poems.”
—Bess Mobley, Still: the Journal
“The Crab Orchard poetry series continues to rock literary culture with Sara Henning’s Burn. The opening poem announces, ‘Tell me that the world is on the verge / of ending, and I’ll believe you.’ Anyone who has faced loss or fear in recent years will show us a world ‘as if [we] have nothing, / everything to live for.’ Henning has really come into her own as a poet with this book.”
—Anna Leahy, author of If in Some Cataclysm
“In her transformative book BURN, Henning invites immersion into life’s infernos, where the wholeness of being is both painful and beautiful all at once. Structured, diverse, and elegantly written, these poems part the smoky haze of life’s sorrows, ultimately revealing personal awakening and hope for a heart’s healing. As BURN tells us ‘Night is only darkness, reimagined’.”
—Jacquelyn Cynkar
“Henning's work is heartfelt and formally playful—she moves through sestinas and duplexes with an astute grace. Her poems speak of the various challenges of being alive--the loss of one's parents, sexual trauma, navigating what home is/isn't—and finds harbor in the sustaining love a marriage can provide. I found myself drawn into the world she weaved and eager to read more of her poems. A flame of a book!”
—Amie Whittemore, author of Nest of Matches
“This book is a must read! It has it all; grief, fear, loneliness and anguish laced with flecks of joy. It chronicles the life of a girl becoming with the deft hand that only Sara Henning can lend. The small town feel it has gives an Appalachian feel to the book. I couldn’t put it down, from start to finish it drew me in and kept my attention until the last breathless page.”
—Kevin LeMaster
“Henning's poems are daring, brave, and like the title implies, fiery! Her words warm the reader in the dark and light a path towards healing through incredible lyricism, word play and imagination. I couldn't get enough, and found myself re-reading when I reached the end, hungrier for heat.”
—Lauren Crawford