Cathryn Hankla

My tenth book, LAST EXPOSURES: a sequence of poems, was published by LSU in spring 2004. The terrain of the poems begins with an exhibit in a San Francisco gallery and ends somewhere beyond the coast of Spain. From grief over the death of a parent to a landscape of larger losses and gains, these poems range and yet retain cohesion through the strategy of tercets.

My Appalachian novel, A BLUE MOON IN POORWATER, is set during 1968, a pivotal year of national disillusionment coupled with the excitement of the moon race. David Parks loses a co-worker in an underground explosion and embarks on a search for justice, caught between the union and the coal company. His daughter Dorie pieces together her family story, and what she reveals encompasses not only her father's conflict but also her older brother's downward spiral. Like Dorie, I grew up in far Southwest Virginia. Her fictional territory is the landscape of my childhood. (To order this or other books not pictured here, please see my expanded site. Click on my picture or the link below.)

A finalist for the 3rd Annual Library of Virginia Prize in Poetry, TEXAS SCHOOL BOOK DEPOSITORY(prose poems, LSU 2000), takes its title from the gunman's nest in the assassination of JFK. Many of the poems are informed by my travels to the Czech Republic and France and address cross cultural ironies and contradictions.

POEMS FOR THE PARDONED contains some of my pithiest and most direct work to date. The poems approach traditional forms as a backdrop for innovation. They explore the dangers and strange juxtapositions of country living in an age of only elegiac relationship to the natural world, along with border crossings that point toward a larger map of relations.