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\u00a0An always-already absent father lost to suicide.\u00a0 A mother\u2019s fragile mask shattered by betrayal.\u00a0 A daughter seeking a name and a face.\u00a0 In Sara Henning\u2019s debut collection, these poems fiercely sing back love in all of its various incarnations from deep within the red clay chambers of a familial ground zero\u2014even as love reveals itself to be sweet mirage, brutal illusion, or a cruel evanescence that must be relinquished into elegy.\u00a0 In piercingly gorgeous lyrics that stun us with both ruthlessness and beauty, Henning\u2019s poems painstakingly climb their way up from the site of unspeakable loss\u2014haunted by the footsteps of ghosts, and relentlessly interrogating the ontological complexities of naming, belonging, embodiment, and spirit.\u00a0 With clarity and compassion, these poems turn back and look directly into what hurts, singing us all into the forgiveness of a sweeter water. <\/p>\n In these poems, the familiar haunts, embodies strangeness, shimmers with the uncanny. The most tender touch is dangerous. To light the night, one sets a wasps\u2019 nest ablaze. Here, anger transmutes to beauty. Here, the beautiful enthralls, lures, is a trap. The Italian painter, Giorgio Morandi, says, \u201cI believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see.\u201d The poems in Sara Henning\u2019s powerful debut collection confirm Morandi\u2019s insight.\u00a0 <\/p>\n Revolving around the subject of a father who has committed suicide, these are poems of memory and loss, poems which show us how a body \u201cmakes a story for the unmentionables of the past,\u201d poems which shine a light on our desperate search for love, our desperate \u201cneed to touch something\u201d and how because of that need we keep touching the\u00a0 \u201choles in our childhood\/ that never stopped burning,\u201d and finally, the poems in\u00a0A Sweeter Water<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0teach us how we must name things which are lost in order to fill the holes sorrow has dug through our lives.\u00a0 <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sara Henning
\n \u2014Lee Ann Roripaugh, Author of\u00a0On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n
\n \u2014Eric Pankey, author of\u00a0The Pear As One Example<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n
\n \u2014Judy Jordan, author of\u00a0Carolina Ghost Woods<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n
\n![](\"https:\/\/finishinglinepress.com\/images\/101Henning_PreferredAuthorPhoto.JPG\")
Sara Henning is the author of one chapbook,\u00a0To Speak of Dahlias<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0(Finishing Line Press, 2012). She holds an MFA from George Mason University and is currently pursuing a PhD from the University of South Dakota, where she teaches and serves as Managing Editor for the\u00a0South Dakota Review<\/em><\/strong>.\u00a0 \u00a0She has been the recipient of residencies at both the Vermont Studio Center and the Performing Arts Forum in St. Erme, France. Her poetry, fiction, interviews and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as\u00a0Crab Orchard Review, Verse, So To Speak, American Letters & Commentary<\/strong>,\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Willow Springs<\/strong><\/em>, among others, and she has poems anthologized in\u00a0Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0(Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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