Return to a Certain Region of Consciousness: New & Selected Poems

Cathryn Hankla gathers recent poems with those culled from previous volumes to reveal a mature poet’s journey through more than four decades of subjects, places, selves, and the challenging art of poetry. From moon shots to pandemic ambiguities, like a color wheel of approaches to poetry’s mystery and meaning, this book’s prose poems, strict syllabics, metrics, and nonce forms of the poet’s making pull into a coherent whole, unified by the poet’s perceptive imagination. Hankla is at home in long poems or haiku, employing close observation, associative collaging, and spinning stories into talismans. The poet’s preoccupations include travels, history, domestic life, childhood, family tragedy, love relationships, art, and environmental and personal losses, while the complicated cultural backdrop of Appalachia together with its topography, flora, and fauna forms a through line, a fault line, and a heartline. Hankla remains a steadfast witness and guardian of the region that has shaped her.

Cathryn Hankla is the author of multiple works in several genres and a visual artist who grew up in Southwest Virginia. Recent publications include IMMORTAL STUFF: PROSE POEMS, NOT XANADU: POEMS, and LOST PLACES: ON LOSING AND FINDING HOME. Hollins University professor emerita of English & Creative Writing, Hankla lives in Roanoke, Virginia.