Alive by Christina Hauck – NWVS #197

Name: Alive by Christina Hauck - NWVS #197
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Debut

979-8-89990-738-8

This title will be released on October 30, 2026

NEW WOMEN’S VOICES SERIES, NO. 197

This invigorating debut collection of poetry balances keen observations of ordinary people—a saxophonist who “testifies to fall,” children “playing cops and crack lord”—with glimpses of the speaker’s own inner, immobilizing turmoil. The title poem, “Alive,” pivots from city to nature, from sharp imagism to expansive, even ecstatic, lyricism. Concentrating on moments distilled from the welter of everyday life—folding t-shirts at the laundromat or “lounging by the river”—these poems illuminate living connections between people, animals, plants, and something “persistent as god.”

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Christina Hauck was born in Berkeley and raised near there. She holds a BA from Mills College (1981), and an MA and a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in (1990, 1994). In 1994 she moved to Manhattan, KS, where she taught in the English department of Kansas State University until her retirement in 2021. A Pushcart- and Best-of-the Web-nominee and Yaddo fellow, her poems have been published in numerous small journals. She lives in Lawrence, KS on unceded land of the Kaw Nation with her lifelong companion, Margaret Wheeler, and small menagerie of adorable mammals. Alive is her debut chapbook.

PRAISE:

Alive reflects on everyday life, like a kaleidoscope that lets us view the world as it spins. We are caught up in that spin which mystifies us through the simple awareness of others: bricklayers, children playing basketball, an old man at the laundromat. But these poems do more than observe. They confront not only ordinary beauty, but violence that has become mundane and routine. Hauck’s poems pull these moments into view and ask what it means, not simply to live, but to be alive. Beauty and pain course through these poems, surfacing like bodies from the broken ground. Hauck tends to language like a gardener, a naturalist set out not only to note the fractured world but to nourish and restore it.

–Dorianne Laux, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, author of Life on Earth

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Alive is an invigorating read. What I love most about it is the way Christina Hauck varies structures and rhythms, poem by poem, depicting—in flashes, pauses, images, details, isolations, and juxtapositions—the myriad ways in which we feel alive in the world. The best example of this is the poem “bricklayers,” which imposes gaps within each line, slowing the reader down, emphasizing each image, phrasing, and perception, until the reader, like a bricklayer, finds a rhythm, pausing briefly to snug each building block into place as the edifice takes shape. This remarkable chapbook, like an artful novel, teaches one how to read it.

–Steve Heller, author of Return of the Ghost Killer

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Christina Hauck’s keenly observed poems tease out “question[s] of / too much or too little” and make a passionate effort “to fix the commotion” of urban life before she simply “moves into it.” This stunningly expansive chapbook pivots from city to country in the title poem “Alive,” as if Hauck is trading patron angel Frank O’Hara for Elizabeth Bishop. Hauck’s care for craft can leave one breathless; take the line break: “It was in the Caribbean I understood the universe / doesn’t care.” But Hauck clearly does care, tending to her poems of heartbreak and resilience with the same considered labor with which she gardens, the subject of rich imagery and metaphor for many of these jewel-like poems.

–George Yatchisin, Santa Barbara, CA Poet Laureate 2025-2027, author of The First Night We Thought the World Would End

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Alive is the perfect title for these poems of pointed insight and passion. Verse elevates quotidian moments into charged lightning flashes. The collection opens with a description of street musicians, whose “Notes, drifting/like leaves/dislocate air”—a marvelous phrase. Subsequent poems also “dislocate air,” as their melodies replace cynicism. Even the most painful poems leave an aftermath of beauty.

–Denise Low, former Kansas Poet Laureate, author of House of Grace (University of Arizona Press)

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