Breaking Into Blossom: Poems with Extraordinary Endings

Breaking into Blossom gathers modern and contemporary poems that use a wide array of techniques and approaches to ending the poem: endings that crescendo and exhort, double back or taper down, those that reverse expectation, embody paradox, or enact their logic in their formal DNA. In their introductory craft essay, co-editors Luke Hankins and Nomi Stone grapple with questions of closure, wholeness, pleasure, power, universalism, subjectivity, discord, exclusion, resistance, surprise, and bewilderment. Finding fracturing points in their own conversation while considering the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of different kinds of endings, the editors consider such questions as the value of epiphany, what kinds of endings might be likelier to be commodified, how the poem and the mind keep going beyond the page, and more. Hankins and Stone also offer a taxonomy of ending types to think with. This groundbreaking anthology includes poems about mystery, love, dread, cruelty, violence and war; poems of motherhood; of disability; of masculinity; of queerness; of baldness. Poems of transforming bodies and Black joy and failure and hope. The poems sometimes break into blossom; other times, they just break. Or they leave us in wonderment with their quiet buds unfolding into the world.

LUKE HANKINS is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Radiant Obstacles and Weak Devotions, as well as a poetry chapbook, Testament (TRP, 2023). He is also the author of a collection of essays, The Work of Creation, and a volume of translations from the French of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, A Cry in the Snow & Other Poems. With Nomi Stone, Hankins is co-editor of Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems. He is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.

Poet and anthropologist NOMI STONEis the author of three books, most recently the poetry collection Kill Class (Tupelo, 2019), finalist for the Julie Suk Award, and the ethnography Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire (University of California Press, 2023), first prize in the Middle East Studies Award from the American Anthropological Association and Honorable Mention of the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Prize. With Luke Hankins, Stone is co-editor of Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems. Winner of a Pushcart Prize and a Fulbright fellowship, she was most recently a Postdoctoral Researcher in Anthropology at Princeton and she is currently an Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Texas, Dallas.