Bücher von Lola Haskins

Homelight is the 14th poetry collection from Lola Haskins, past winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, two Florida Book Awards, two NEA fellowships, and other honors. As late work sometimes does, Homelight has a broad reach. In the first section, "On the Shoulders of Giants," Haskins remembers poets who preceded her, Sappho to Blake to Merwin. After lingering to consider a Michelangelo drawing, she moves on to birds in "Wings." Then, in "And They Are Gone" and "(In)humanity," she turns to the arrogance of the way we treat the planet and each other. A pause for "Corona," then on to love, both bad and good, in "The Slapped Girl." The final section, "Rehearsing," considers death, in the form of tributes to lost friends and her own preparations to follow them. There is humor here, lyricism and epic sweeps, and, almost at the end, these lines to a lover: "I wear you under my clothes the way a Sikh wears his cord, / in token of the ineffable beauty of the world," which - as Merwin, who praised her work, would have seen immediately - might as well have been addressed to poetry itself.

This book is about Latina identity, a timely subject in today's America. The author's journey begins as she, full of love for Mexico and its culture despite her closest blood connection being her bisabuela, boards a bus. She starts out determined: "Yes foreign is a word for fear. Yes I am coming home." But then, because "it is afraid, staying in a language where you were not born," she retreats, hiding first behind we, then behind masks. But when it becomes clear that the masks are her true self, she loses her fear, and barrels ahead as I, fully committed, all the way to the end.

"Lola Haskins's range is broad; her perceptions are always surprising. Natural objects surpass themselves and episodes of women's history are rewritten in this lively, adventuresome collection."-Maxine Kumin" . . . Hunger is a cabinet of crystals each one with a cutting edge. It's a wonder."-Beloit Poetry Journal"She knows we are rooted to the earth but long for the stars. . . . And she's wise enough to know that love searches us out. Dazzling."-Northwest Arkansas Times"[The poems] richly present the experience of women, as the complexity of their material, emotional, and imaginative lives presses against the constraints of their assigned roles. . . wonderfully evocative."-The Hudson Review". . . Convincing and exquisitely visual. It plays off a painterly use of visualization and technique even as it enacts the limits of such artistry in the face of real feeling. . . . It is the clarity of Haskins's poems and (her speakers') observations, combined with the sometimes elegant, sometimes searing restraint with which the observations are made, that gives these poems their impact."-Colorado Review

"Lola Haskins's range is broad; her perceptions are always surprising. Natural objects surpass themselves and episodes of women's history are rewritten in this lively, adventuresome collection."-Maxine Kumin" . . . Hunger is a cabinet of crystals each one with a cutting edge. It's a wonder."-Beloit Poetry Journal"She knows we are rooted to the earth but long for the stars. . . . And she's wise enough to know that love searches us out. Dazzling."-Northwest Arkansas Times"[The poems] richly present the experience of women, as the complexity of their material, emotional, and imaginative lives presses against the constraints of their assigned roles. . . wonderfully evocative."-The Hudson Review". . . Convincing and exquisitely visual. It plays off a painterly use of visualization and technique even as it enacts the limits of such artistry in the face of real feeling. . . . It is the clarity of Haskins's poems and (her speakers') observations, combined with the sometimes elegant, sometimes searing restraint with which the observations are made, that gives these poems their impact."-Colorado Review

This book is about Latina identity, a timely subject in today's America. The author’s journey begins as she, full of love for Mexico and its culture despite her closest blood connection being her bisabuela, boards a bus. She starts out determined: "Yes foreign is a word for fear. Yes I am coming home." But then, because "it is afraid, staying in a language where you were not born," she retreats, hiding first behind we, then behind masks. But when it becomes clear that the masks are her true self, she loses her fear, and barrels ahead as I, fully committed, all the way to the end.