A Muted Blue Star Muses: Review of Han VanderHart's "Larks"

Wednesday, March 5, 2025

Review of Han VanderHart's "Larks"

Han VanderHart, Larks (Ohio State University Press, 2025) 86 pages, poetry, forthcoming at the time of this writing. More info here.

There's a lot going in this collection in a comparatively brief space. VanderHart covers subjects as variable as sibling-on-sibling child sexual abuse, mental illness, generationally changing values on parenting, a love of nature and herbalism and birds, a deep sense of place, etc. All written in a familiar Appalachian voice (but not the Appalachian language. Not to worry, if you are from elsewhere, this is written in standard American English but the Appalachian voice very much comes through). A lot of the poem titles are quotes, revealing that VanderHart has understood the assignment of every good writer: they read more than they write.

They hook you in with some comfortable poems that root you in place without explicitly naming that place. And then they land the punches of the real battles this book tip-toes around. I say "tip-toes", because as hard-hitting as some of this is, there is always the feeling that VanderHart is holding back, swallowing the worst, because they know it's too much for us. I respect that.

Favourite lines:

"I do not know whether it is morning or mourning" - "Invocation"

"My mother's family dammed the river and trapped the fish so often/ it became their name." - "The Body Is Water and the Water Has Origins"

"I think you should use the language/ of where you come from" - "Artist's Statement In a Mountain Cabin"

"Some things you fix/ and they break again/ and again" - "Broken"

"I measure your beginning by a glass of water and the hands that/ caught you. Somewhere" - "How people tell time is an intimate and local fact about them" Ann Carson

"... what's inside the heart and also/ the land: the dirt containing more" - "Virginia seemed like always right" David Lynch

"I Can't Let My Mind Go to the Thicket" - whole poem

"I want an otherworldly ex-/ planation for unkindness, which // is the milk of the world." - "Larks"

Ohio University State Press is a BIPOC/LGBTQIA+ Press.

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"Fingers" Broadside

A unique broadside designed and printed on January 4, 2014 for the Kentucky Association of Sexual Assault Programs (KASAP)'s The Rising Center's "No More" traveling art exhibit to raise awareness to end sexual and domestic violence. The art exhibit will travel throughout the state of Kentucky in 2015, after which the broadside will be auctioned off at the Rising Center's discretion. The broadside features the much-praised poem "Fingers" from the collection "Following Hope" (Xlibris, 2007). There is only one (1) "Fingers" Broadside in existence.

Rabbit Hole

"I want the reader to imagine a dream, a dream of the sort that is not quite a nightmare where the dreamer wakes in terror but rather a dream where the dreamer is led on from curiosity to curiosity, image to image, and, confused perhaps but no less surprised by the images, wakes with a head scratch and begins the day, thinking about the world as a much stranger place than when the reader laid down to sleep ... [In the poems where the language is more] extreme . . . the deconstruction of language . . . [mirrors] the shattered state of language today and the impossibility to understand discourse of any kind anymore. It is as if language itself is designed to disguise meaning rather than convey it.” - George Fillingham

Renaissance: Visual Art 2005 - 2019

“Renaissance” is an emotional collection of work. Sabne Raznik’s pieces present the human experience in a thought-provoking and abstract way through body shapes and delicate hues. A mix of digital and traditional media, Raznik’s work is compelling in a way that makes the viewer’s eyes want to linger - taking all the details in. The traditional drawings of the “Salome Series” capture movement and exotic femininity with only the use of line and simple shading, while mixed media pieces like “Beautiful Tatters” find beauty in the mundane or unusual, like a scrap of paper soaked in wine. Raznik’s digital paintings feel like one is looking at a human emotion depicted in soft fields of color. Raznik is well known for her written word, but is proving herself to be quite the visual storyteller as well. This body of work is an excellent addition to any collection.-- Erin Alise ConleyMixed Media Artist, Host of "Weird Appalachia" Podcast

Renaissance: Positivity Cards for an Uplifting Day

"Dreaming of Bono" (VoiceLux, 2022)

A little girl, a young lady, and a mature woman walk into a bar and order a pint of Guinness. Only the mature woman leaves. Why? Because "hope has wings" and only the mature woman has the experience enough to manipulate "the sadness in our will : the courage of noble righteous doomed, who defy and defy ... because we must, if only for those who lack the strength to fight". Because, as I told you, "she's lived more than you'll ever read". The collection is a taste of mental growth in action, weaving dreams, reality and over the top stardom into a father figure only to outgrow him in the most superlative way. A carry in your pocket lifting of burdens to peruse over and over again. Why? Because "hope" is making a ruckus to get your attention! -- Marica, Artist

Fingers/Dedos Bilingual Selected Poems (English/Spanish)

Sabne Raznik’s latest collection of poetry Fingers, Selected Poems / Dedos, Poemas Seleccionados contains four powerfully emotive poems (“The Bearded Prophet,” “Poetry,” “Through Our Skin,” and “Fingers”). The English original of each poem is followed by an illustration and then by a Spanish translation by María Del Castillo Sucerquia. It concludes with a photo of the author followed by a one-paragraph biography in English and then its Spanish translation. The four poems are extremely different thematically and make use of different poetic languages. The common denominator between them is an underlying existential anxiety resulting from the inability of human beings collectively to understand each other and set aside greed and self-interest, and individually, in the case of the poet, to find consummation in love, and to discover the language in words and images to capture and communicate the essence of her experience. The poet notes in “Bearded Prophet,” she finds herself in “the era of pain -stampeding pain,” one which paradoxically leads her to identify with the “dumb hillbilly,” the bearded prophet who wears a sign that says “The End of the World Is Near.” Impending doom is suggested by images of the destruction of the environment, the open gashes of Appalachian strip mines, trees stripped bear of life to a height of eight feet by herbicide, and the violent midwestern storms intensified by climate change. “Poetry,” the most abstract of the four poems, prescribes in the form of a series of commands (“arm yourself, “leave the figure,” “Virgin love grow bold” which do not lead to consummation; they prove impotent. “Through the Skin” evokes the locus of creativity, where books, and papers, paint and turpentine are present on a table along with cup and saucer, the place where the written word and the painted image are crafted. The poem leaves the reader with a sense of a purpose shared by the “us” of the poem: “to sketch an idea to live by.” The last poem “Fingers” evokes images of a painful, repeated sexual encounter described as a violation, “like cactus thorns raking down my shapeless lines,” but the violation seems not to result from the violent impulse of the other, rather from the inability of the speaking subject to make good on the promise to the self with the words “Never again, never again.” The four poems are satisfying both as individual compositions and as panels of a multi-media whole. – Yndiana Montes Fogelquist and Jim Fogelquist, Appalachian Latinidad Fingers/Dedos is a powerful chapbook with 4 elaborate poems in English, with the same poems being translated into Spanish. The poetry captures strong images and emotions: "You sat cross-legged in the grass/And the earth framed your face." I was pulled into these poems and transformed into a cocoon waiting to be released into something with such fingers that would "Feel the bone crack,/Grind against my teeth/As I scream [...]" and become new in the aftermath. – John Compton, the castration of a minor god and how we liberated what secrets we modified

Wednesday, March 5, 2025

Review of Han VanderHart's "Larks"

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