This History That Just Happened - Hannah Craig (Parlor Press)

Today's book of poetry:
This History That Just Happened.  Hannah Craig.  Parlor Press.  Anderson, South Carolina.  2017.

Winner of the NEW MEASURE POETRY PRIZE

This History That Just Happened by Hannah Craig announces a new voice arrived fully formed.  The poems in This History... create an instant context whether Craig is country bound and ruminating on barn swallows or inside the mind of torture, cataloguing the tools designed to get at the truth through pain.

Craig isn't offering up any easy solutions as she disassembles our previously held misconceptions about "Faith Healing" or a mental list of associates who cook meth.  But she will tackle the landscape between "the Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary" and "when the baby bites through the electrical cord."  Don't let Today's book of poetry misinform you though, This History That Just Happened is no sideshow, Craig's poems inflame the reader, they create surface tension and heat, and all of this because she takes our language to unfamiliar terrain.  Today's book of poetry had to break out the dictionary a few times, a painful but necessary confession.  Craig will give you ample reason to want to get it right. 

The Little Sleep

Think of death, think of driving

through the game preserve on rain

& brake fluid,

between Shock Lake and Bass Pond

gravel & dirt & rich blood

 deer strung in oak trees

hunt caps in the orange trees slow-walking

thighs like cold barrels

rolling, rolling

Look, the dialogue of new death

is broader, forget what you heard on Sunday,

this is new speech

floating across the yard, someone's forearm

braced against the bedroom window,

a tin-lip shaped on milk glass

a forethought in chipped polish

Shoot a memento, subsistence or justice.

Shoot back-talkers, antlers, tigers, kids.

Suddenly there's so much churl in the fanning swamp-water.

So much curl in the fern leaves where the frost drops

like duck eggs.

Three languages now, instead of one.

Two of these show that the powerful need to eat first.

They must or they die, I think.

That's why the birds kettle

to a big bass drum on Indiana evenings,

boom-tock-boom.

The fox scrambles to the ditch

but we keep thinking of measurements:

number of eggs for custard

number of eggs for a silky afternoon

number of softened, soaked vanilla beans

the powerful need to serve a sit-down meal

roast, bread, beans

the coroner's gray sedan

wheels of needling silence, rims of ice

and the cows with their muddy boots

the farmer brings out the eggs on his carbon-fiber leg

he used to shoot Afghans, now shoos chickens

& ducks aside    come on so come on

an egg dark as brass, some jam

again the ferny green that never truly evaporates

from the rims and fallen limbs along the bank

like the green trim on this flat sheet

fails to offer comfort or much dignity

anyway, warriors, the light here now

the light of how committed we have become to rigidity

to what is only here this little while

of how we are to nowhere called and to all places bound.

...

This is another case of Today's book of poetry liking the way another poet talks.  These poems are measured doses of acerbic with and quaint country charm.  They are as sweet as fresh milk and as dark as the murderer's shadow.  Craig's instrument has range and she makes her interests ours.  There is a charm to how her history intersects with ours so we that we know the way to be true.

This History That Just Happened celebrates Craig's imagination and we are left to marvel at the vast range of her reading and source material.  Craig's curiosity provides her teleology, but Today's book of poetry may be confused, it wouldn't be a first, many of these things go over our short head when we postulate about what we believe to be true.

What we do know for a certainty is that we were entertained in our poetry heart.

From One Thing, Another

     "I had neither hate nor pity. The situation was urgent..."

                                     -- Paul Aussaresses, French torturer (2) 

The chair is an agent of pain, though

     it does not have agency. It is unyielding.

As is the garden hose. A toilet. A red lamp.

Towel bar. Bedsheet. Metal spoon.

Look, we can build a little house of this torture,

we can fill its cabinets with knives and forks.

With buckets and bathtubs. And you will be alone

in this house, alone with your thoughts,

with the hours, or beetles, black and scurrying.

No, you will never be alone in this house.

Decades after the skin has knitted, knotted,

burled its way over and into each hurt,

you will have become another woman

with a shopping bag, squeezing carrots.

And he will be, somewhere distant,

a grandfather who likes to fish in the summer.

At the change of light which comes

near the end of the day, both of you will stop

of a sudden, will half-turn, and see in the quiet

arrangement of chair-legs and tables, of cords

and curtain rods, of lamp-bulbs and the chains

that ignite them, a sinister echo, a flashing

dark animal. One that skulks through this house

of shouting that straddles two worlds, two eras,

in which you both pace your separate-but united chambers,

dream your dreams, fold your errant laundry,

perform your nightly ablutions.

(2) Brass. Martin. "Torture to Prevent Terrorism?" Military.com. N.p.,2001.

Web. 13 June 2016.

...

This morning's read started with Dexter Gordon's sublime "Tanya" blasting over the house speakers. That usually get the full attention of the staff.  Everyone gathered and Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, the leader of our poetry reading pack, was nowhere to be seen.  Apparently she is in Paris.  And I am the last to know.  Well, no one has earned it more.

Our Kathrynless reading went over seamlessly.  Max crawled out of his hermitage and just took over the floor like "God's own MC".  Max directed us, each in turn, as though directing a choir.  Max gave each of us the Craig poem best suited to our voice, read a few himself, masterfully, and then without another word shuffled back to his den of iniquity and closed the door.

Fever

red is infection, first bloom

of deeper malady and there are

fields interlaced, watermelon snow

the brassy tufts of fox fur caught

on barbed wire          look, fire

has been here and your cheeks perk

heat like a tea-kettle    you are getting

close to a boil, look the skin

erupts, the winter brings out roses

on your sweet, too-thin upper lip

the fox is there again, down in the ditch

waiting for a chance

and this is the theater of red, the velvet rope

of the human body on deep blue sheets

the wild strawberry, too small to cut

or bite or share, it must be taken whole

it must be fought by the body along the way

but also embraced          deconstructed

the way a sonata can be unhinged, bass

from melody, hand from hand

the fox with her deep black hole is waiting

in the snow and your body implies heat

wherever it goes       we stand there

too long in the shower steam

until everything we meant evaporates

what did we have on our skin?

has our hot blood cooled? have we cooled?

and why is the sound coming now, the growl

which both beseeches and protests

just lie on your back with your arms here

and there and with the red flag in your chest

across your rising, raving dream

a soft, faint thing thuds and skids

the snow fails at impression

and there's nothing but ozone, then

the cornfields and everything imagined

...

Today's book of poetry is pleased as punch, it is always a pleasure to discover another poet who helps us all push forward.  

Poems this smart push us up.

Hannah Craig

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hannah Craig is an Indiana native and a graduate of the University of Chicago. She won the 2016 Mississippi Review Prize and her manuscript was a finalist for the Akron Poetry Prize, the Fineline Competition, and the Autumn House Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared widely in such publications as Smartish Pace, North American Review, Fence, Mississippi Review, and Prairie Schooner.

BLURB

Hannah Craig's This History That Just Happened places the reader at the nexus where rural and city life converge, bridging a world personal and political, natural and artful, in a voice always uniquely hers. Every word here is earned. And little, if anything, escapes this poet’s heart, mind, or eye. History works through a keen imagination. These poems make us feel and listen differently, and images coalesce line by line and dare us to reside where fierce empathy and beauty abide.

     —Yusef Komunyakaa

parlorpress.com 

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