Terra Incognita Available for Pre-Order

(sarahenningpoet.com) Terra Incognita, Sara Henning’s newest award-winning collection of poems, is now available for pre-order online.

This collection of poems was recently selected by Rebecca Morgan Frank as the winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize from Ohio University Press. In Terra Incognita, the reader delves deeper into the author’s tumultuous relationship with her mother: from growing up poor in Georgia, to coming to terms with her mother’s death from cancer, to finally accepting love and joy while reconciling her grief.

Henning’s work has already received advanced praise from several noteworthy poets authors.

“Sara Henning’s Terra Incognita opens with a dream, and the poems undo us the way dreams do, with imagery that is seared into our minds so completely we can’t shake it. I left this book reluctantly, a little dazed, and wanting to go back inside the world Henning created, ‘the sky dusk-raw,’ the stars ‘moving braille.’ Terra Incognita is a rare book of poems, and Henning is a rare talent.”

—Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones and Goldenrod

“‘Grief turns out to be a place none of us knows until we reach it,’ Joan Didion once declared. Sara Henning crafts beautiful and protean music out of the terra incognita of motherlessness. The gallery of richly evoked lines and incidents suggests the poet is a dynamic, at-the-ready elegist for all she sees. ‘In the belly of every summer day is a god / taking its first breath, so I learn to call it praying, / my mother forsaking the AC for a grace called smoking / in the car.’ Yes, one of the book’s major triumphs is that Henning, with artful precision and a daughter’s utmost love, makes the vital woman who was her first window on the world count for the reader as well.”

—Cyrus Cassells, 2021 poet laureate of Texas

Terra Incognita will be officially released in March 2022. You can pre-order your copy via Ohio University Press and Amazon.