The Holy or the Broken Hallelujah by Kristina Hakanson

In this impressive first collection, Kristina Hakanson gives us—in both free verse and lyric prose forms—poems of considerable range and power, most poignantly those about her beloved father’s terminal illness. In one, she makes this striking and quintessentially human confession: “I’m about to say goodbye / to my bedridden father, / the first man I loved, / the only one whose heart I refuse to break, / ashamed that I ever did, / if I ever did. / I’m sure I did.” Hakanson’s work evokes a fraught yet wrenchingly beautiful world—a “heaven’s underside” in which “Each sorrow converted to ice / grows warm in the palm of your hand.”
–Paulann Petersen Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

Both elegiac and celebratory, these poems derive their strength from the real world around us: wooden spoons, egg-beaters, a coffee cup, the teeth of a harrow – touched here and there by an element of the surreal (a wolf in a cello).  I admire their clean language and plainspoken balance, from the mundane to the eternal — their realization that “Whole lives are lived on the dirt/ which long ago came from the stars”.

–Joseph Millar