Humorous, quirky, and spiritually meditative by turns, Cathryn Hankla's prose poems move by associative leaps and take their inspirations from cultural and personal icons. A shadow narrative moors the collection in the perspective of a woman who survives a difficult childhood to eventually comprehend the paradoxes of adult life and whose journeys into her heritage bring her to a fuller realization of her place in the world. Travels to Prague and Paris, allusions to literary, spiritual, artistic, and political figures, local and familial lore -- all become ready touchstones for the...

In this powerful poetic sequence wrought of deft tercets, Cathryn Hankla navigates the slippery, ever-changing territory between art and life. The death of the poet's father by car accident is the focal event for the collection, and all the poems reflect the collision of the physical and transcendent. Whether describing the abandoned nest of a Carolina wren or the excavation of the Kennewick Man, Hankla sounds a muted grief in these lines. But with wit, channeled through language and rhythm, the poet keeps traveling forward: by car and by camel, from San Francisco to Spain, with many stops...

Cathryn Hankla's first novel is an engaging coming-of-age story set in the small Appalachian mining town of Poorwater, Virginia. It is the summer of 1968, and the narrator, inquisitive ten-year-old Dorie Parks, is getting ready to enter fifth grade when her errant older brother Willie returns to town. A religious fanatic and suspected drug user, Willie represents to the residents of Poorwater the hippie counterculture that threatens their conservative town, and his return is the catalyst for a string of strange and sometimes tragic events. Dorie's father, a miner, begins a dangerous labor...