This post could be a LitHub article—or, I could have developed it into one. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to keep it intimate and small. I did not want it to be for everyone. I did not want it to be wide, to have many applications, to appeal to a great number of readers. Instead, I wanted to share some texts that have particularly carried me, helped me, been a balm and a salve to me as I healed and wrote Larks. Because how do you write trauma? How do you go into some of your darkest times, your deepest wounds, and write? In part, you read. In part, you sit with others who have also suffered. You take your time. You do not rush. You learn to breathe again. Here are three poetry collections that helped me breathe again.

1. The Dream of Reason by Jenny George

Domestic, rural, tender, inhabiting silence in such compassionate and deeply felt ways. I knew the companionship of suffering the second I began to read George’s collection. I wrote a review of George’s collection which was only the third review I had ever written, noting of the above poem “The Dream of Reason’s opening poem, ‘Origins of Violence,’ recounts a narrative of violence and horror with the gentleness of telling a story to a child.” Writing of trauma requires a great tenderness, and you will not find a more tender shepherd of language than Jenny George.

2. Brute by Emily Skaja

Brute Strength

Skaja’s Brute is a collection of escape as well as wildness, which is another path in and through and out of trauma, particularly relational trauma. It does what we need poetry of trauma to do—to make a narrative clear, to ring a bell, to parse the speaker’s tangled history. I love that fierceness and self-acceptance is central to this collection, as is the recovery of the early self, the first self—”where is that witch girl / unafraid of anything,” the speaker asks.

3. A Woman of Property by Robyn Schiff

Fourth of July, 2012

I can’t say much here, except that both Robyn Schiff’s poetry and Schiff’s person as a teacher gave me language centered around the concept of Greek tragedy and kindness —and I needed that kindness most of all. It is rare to meet so brilliant a poet who is also an extremely kind person in their actions, giving of themselves to students who are not well known or privileged. I’m deeply indebted to Schiff, and lines from “Fourth of July, 2012” provide an epigraph to my long poem “Larks,” at the center of Larks.

I hope this encourages you to draw close texts as you write your own books. We don’t write or think in isolation. To be human is, as Heidegger of all people said (!), to be a conversation. We don’t need to write alone, or feel alone. We have a community of books, and each other. And that is something to celebrate, that we have models for our storytelling and articulation.

Wishing you good reading and fortifying of yourselves, this spring.

Han

p.s. I have a short essay and David Lynch-inspired sonnet newly published in Slow Orbit! Read it here.

p.p.s. I’ll be having an official launch for Larks at Letters Bookshop in Durham, NC, on Thursday, March 13, at 6:30pm! Reading with poet and librarian Emilie Menzel! Please come out!