Bøger af Katherine Hastings

If there's such a thing as fierce Buddhism, Katherine Hastings' Nighthawks finds it. Here is nature in minutely observed, embroidered detail, juxtaposed with terse and stark observations keyed from Rexroth's "holiness of the real." Hastings is unafraid: she writes fearlessly of subjects such as the slaughter of children at an elementary school in Connecticut, the death of a young black man in a subway station, and opens a brave and unblinking lens on a lover's cancer. In backdrop, though, always: the steadiness of nature flourishing: brilliant colors amid the unanswered questions. Gerald Fleming Rooted in what Hastings calls the "momentary forever," these marvelous poems, so rich with detail and so full of duende, explore the paradoxes of transience. Yes, the poet reminds us: "The alarm is set and ticking" for each least thing in the living world: "A boy made in the image of Lorca; turkey vultures...with wings like shredded violins." Still, the "eyes of the world" (eyes of the poet!) "are always hungry..."; so the poet must read every "...tune placed in [her] beak// where the lust of one tear holds/ every note of joy, of sorrow/ trembling under the stars". And these new poems do insist on inhabiting hard realities-a beloved's cancer diagnosis; the public murder of an innocent young man by a police officer-but also, in "Perseid From a Park Bench," two lovers wish on a meteor falling through the night sky, and Hastings reminds us: "We humans do this, place hope on a ball of dust passing through a comet's tail." Susan Kelly-DeWitt These poems capture a double exposure where earth and sky meld to map what is close and what is seemingly out of reach. Hastings' horizon shifts from the reality of earth bound oceans to the celestial ocean where we swim in a sea of stars. Like ancient astronomers, she sees connections often missed by the casual eye. She becomes in effect a soothsayer of stars and taps into the music of their stillness as they witness the coincidental paths we take in our lives, the stars above us "an angel apiece/burning so far out of reach". Colleen McElroy

Edited with an Introduction by Katherine Hastings Devreaux Baker Ellen Bass Elizabeth Bradfield Janine Canan Maxine Chernoff Susan Cohen Elizabeth J. Coleman Gillian Conoley Lucille Lang Day Sharon Doubiago Susan Kelly-DeWitt Camille T. Dungy Iris Jamahl Dunkle Sandy Eastoak Terry Ehret Annie Finch Molly Fisk Miriam Bird Greenberg Judy Halebsky Elizabeth Herron Brenda Hillman Jane Hirshfield Jodi Hottel Maya Khosla Lynne Knight Danusha Lamèris Kathleen Lynch Mary Mackey Colleen McElroy Jane Mead Toni Mirosevich Rusty Morrison Gwynn O'Gara Connie Post Kim Shuck Hannah Stein Melissa Stein Jennifer K. Sweeney Julia Vose Laura Walker Gillian Wegener Arisa White Toni Wilkes Leonore Wilson Kathleen Winter Pui Ying Wong

Love. Honor. Redemption.A shattered soldier searching for redemption finds the one thing he never knew he needed. Her.After growing up in an orphanage, Auguste never knew love, friendship or family until he found them with his brothers-in-arms when he joined the French Army during WWI... as a German espionage agent. When his past catches up with him he's forced to flee from his newfound family, taking refuge on a horse farm in the French countryside. While he tries to redeem himself, he finds the one thing his training didn't prepare him for. The one thing he never knew he wanted.... Isabelle, the stable owner's daughter.Isabelle is intrigued by the mysterious new farmhand on her family's horse-racing farm. Their chemistry is undeniable but something is holding him back. While he fights to find redemption and she fights to heal from a devastating loss, the wars within them turn to battling the feelings for one another they can no longer deny.Can Auguste right the wrongs in his past, or will his dark secret destroy his one chance to have the life and love he's always wanted?

How refreshing to come across a book like Katherine Hastings' marvelous Cloud Fire, rich and verdant in formal experiment and range. Mixing lyrics, narratives, curses, blessings, spells, and unabashed love poems, the work is hard-won and honest, generous and rigorous. In poem after poem Katherine Hastings casts her ever-vigilant, observing eye, sharp as it is poignant. Her deepest concern seems our perilous locale and planet: "My city whose streams are rock doves and parrots/ whose bright arm is a spring board for love and suicides" and yet "we breathe here better than anywhere, distressed." Gillian Conoley Lovely... it's your veiled history. Lawrence Ferlinghetti For Katherine Hastings, "The mirror is a lake of longing." Her poems are told us by "a woman with a moon in her chest"; their surprising images embrace close observation, deeply dramatized love and losses, and have the power of crossing boundaries of spirit to reveal truths otherwise unseen. Daniel Hoffman, U.S. Poet Laureate, 1973-74 Katherine Hastings is a poet whose words embody light; she is the ambassador of luminescence to American poetry today. It is no wonder that clouds catch on fire in this magnificent and transformative collection. In poems like "Whittenberg", where an atmosphere of light invades and reshapes, "Pushing off from the Wall", where white cells of water, jewel-lined/undulate amoeba-shapes, and "Twister" clear blue prophecy is proclaimed. In "Bird. Song. Knife. Heart" (No one saw her glide among the lake or river/a radiance wrapped in flame), and "Mother" ("Light transfers from the formless/smatters across the given/world"), and so many others, Hastings truly succeeds in evoking a continent of light on radiant pages ...There is no voice like hers! I wholeheartedly recommend Cloud Fire, poems that will illumine your consciousness both while reading and long, long afterwards. Lee Slonimsky

Some flames refuse to go out...When Ellie awakes with an epic hangover the day after she caught her boyfriend cheating, it isn't the pounding in her head causing her to scream. It's the discovery of the late-night message she sent to the boy she loved ten years ago. The one she hasn't seen since their week-long whirlwind summer romance in Door County. The boy she gave her heart to and forgot to take it back.You know... The Big One. After they reconnect online, the years apart haven't diminished their chemistry one bit. Desperate to find out if he's really her one true love, she lets her meddling wingmen convince her to do the craziest thing she's ever done in her well-planned life-she hops on a plane to surprise him in Italy. When Ellie waltzes back into his life and the sparks still fly between them, Liam is determined not to let her slip away again. He's spent ten years trying to forget her, and now he'll do anything to convince her to stay.As Ellie and Liam reconnect and try to bridge the ocean between them, they soon find more than just distance can tear them apart.

It's a long way from a basement apartment in a Montreal suburb to a new life on a fictional planet, but that's the destination our unnamed narrator has set his sights on, bringing readers with him on an off-beat and often hilarious journey.