vanderhart

The core of Larks is rural and mythic and true, existential and domestic, tender while full of sharp grief and documentation. Circling genealogies of silence and harm in a southern family, Larks centers on the relationship and memories of three sisters and Ovid’s telling of Philomel. In a landscape inhabited as much by farm animals (cows, goats, chickens, and barn kittens) as by the family, the lyric poem parses and articulates the self’s history--from the experience of a sister’s home birth to the traumatic erasure (and recovery) of the speaker’s memory. A work of poetic memoir, Larks asks if poetry can hold the heaviest truths we carry. The answer is a resounding yes.

Han VanderHart holds a PhD from Duke University and is the author of What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021) and Hands Like Birds (Ethel Press, 2019). They have published in the Kenyon Review, the American Poetry Review, and AGNI. VanderHart also hosts the Of Poetry Podcast and coedits River River Books.