Reviews
Review by: Angela Ball - December 1, 2021
This brilliant and absorbing collection of poems, Cathryn Hankla's tenth, greets us with 'not,' refusing a poetic paradise; and goes on to embrace trees, birds, stars, American history, and the ghosts of roses. Craft and feeling intensify each other throughout; especially in the Cinquain Sonnets and their lightning, rough-edged resolutions. The past is adamant. To articulate its refusals disturbs memory, muddies, and clarifies. Undeceived, mind and heart must somehow adjust. Experience stands half-built and half-demolished, vulnerable, 'Not Xanadu.' That is this book's challenge and its radiance.
Review by: Carol Moldaw - December 1, 2021
The poems in Cathryn Hankla's NOT XANADU are clear-eyed and sharp-tongued, vulnerable, unabashed, and prescient. To live in our moment, they suggest, we'd best be alert to absurdity as well as beauty, and hold close moments of reverie as well as face affronts, to know both 'the broken egg and the living bird.' A close observer of both nature and the use and misuse of language, a runner, a native Appalachian, a mindful woman, Hankla can suggest volumes in the merest phrase. These lyric and keen poems have in equal measure seriousness of purpose and lightness of touch.
Review by: Dara Wier - December 1, 2021
NOT XANADU's poems make an indispensable contribution to many subjects: despair, broken-heartedness, regret, bitterness, careful observation of one's self and what one sees, awe, hope. Hankla has written a book that lets us see why poems are written. The poem 'Considering the Alternative' shows the way.