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."
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