Hard Letters and Folded Wings by Martha Brenckle

In “Sunday Afternoon at the Museum of Natural History,” the speaker of Martha Brenckle’s poem notes that “Here all life is hierarchical.”  But that’s only in the museum.  Throughout the poems in this quietly beautiful collection, Hard Letters and Folded Wings, Brenckle offers testimony to how most of life’s most precious and momentous turns are not experienced as hierarchies imposed from above but as lateral shifts, movements and flutterings from the side, gifts from what surrounds us — if we are willing to receive or embrace them.  Thinking of her dying father, for instance, the speaker in “My Father’s Heart” tells us that “My role has been virtually cast for decades, / but there is comfort in the familiar precision of family: / the meals cooked, the socks washed, the arrangements made.”  When writing about migrant workers “who walked from poverty…injustice…certain death,” she bears witness to “a woman leaving her shoes behind and running.”  When documenting the sufferings of war, she reflects on how “one would barely know we were at war with ourselves.”  And when remembering love, she traces how “my tongue wrapped inside you— / even then I hoarded memories.”  In each moment, the most important thing, the carefully observed interaction, the emotion recollected, the history made, the meaning created comes from moments shared or, painfully, a failure to share, or a sense of impending loss of ability to share further.  These are poems about what we give each other — love, surely, but also insight and at times even wisdom — and what preciously remains behind after the gift.

–Jonathan Alexander, author of Creep: A Life, A Theory, An Apology and Finding Out: An Introduction to LGBTQ Studies

Intimate, sensual, Hard Letter and Folded Wings tells of “the bright thing that needed to be done” when its speaker leaves behind “a little wooden house” of “ordered domesticity” for the creative life, with eros at its core.  Along the way, Brenckle marries the personal heroic act with public and historic bravery, as well as tragedy, in a series of compelling lyric spotlights. What makes this collection a gem is its attention to practical as well as sensuous detail, in the language of the “moist/ sea star” that “opens to your fingers and mouth,” and in a world where to “love me big” has real consequences.

–Sawnie Morris, author of Her, Infinite, winner of the 2016 New Issues Poetry Award