Hard Letters and Folded Wings by Martha Brenckle
$14.99
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
Description
Hard Letters and Folded Wings
by Martha Brenckle
$14.99, paper
978-1-64662-050-0
2019
Martha Catherine Brenckle is a Professor at the University of Central Florida where she teaches First-year Writing and Rhetorical Theory. She writes poetry and fiction and has published most recently in The Sea Letter, Clockhouse Review, Broken Bridge Review, Burningword Literary Magazine, and Bryant Literary Review among others. In 2000, she won the Central Florida United Arts Award for Poetry. Martha is a former performance poet and has performed her monologues on lesbian life in Orlando, Tampa, Atlanta, New Haven, New Orleans, Chicago, San Antonio, and Baltimore. Her first novel, Street Angel (2006) and was nominated for a Lambda Award and a Triangle Award and was a Finalist for Fence Magazine’s 2007 Best GLBT Novel Award. She lives in Winter Park, FL with her wife Patty and their gray tabby cats.
Jane (verified owner) –
These love stories to history are evocative and , and even when they deal with painful scenes, they leave me with a ray of enduring hope. I was struck as I read them how often I wanted to send them to people in my life. “Pin Point, Georgia” for my sister, “Waking the Dead” for my father; long gone, but he’d still love that poem, and definitely the “Centerville Shoe Store, 1965” for my grandfather, who took me shoe shopping all those years ago in Portland to buy my Buster Brown Shoes.
Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés –
There is so much poignancy in the intimate moments of these poems as well as in the power of the women who inhabit them. These poems bring close all these women we think we know, Amelia, Clara, Persephone, and all the sisters, daughters and lovers, we wish to know. We are also introduced to women we need to know, the named activists (Angela Martinez from “Construction Border Quilts”) to the unnamed hundreds fighting gun violence (“7,000 Pairs of Shoes Left Behind”) and extraordinary factory women from “Radium Girls” and “The Mills, Fall River, Massachusetts.”