Chera Hammons

Chera Hammons

Selected Poetry

Reviews and Interviews

Audio and Video

Play the below video to watch a segment of The Handle on Panhandle PBS featuring Chera, her cat Kevin, and her poem "Tornado Alley."

Chera Hammons

Novels

Poetry

Chera Hammons

Monarchs of the Northeast Kingdom

Monarchs of the Northeast Kingdom, Torrey House Press, March 2020

"A highly satisfying, delicately woven story about loss, loneliness, life, and death."— KIRKUSAnna and John, a master saddle maker, have created a quiet existence for themselves in rural Vermont, a rugged landscape where coyotes roam, bears threaten the livestock, and poachers trespass. When John is murdered in the woods near their home, chronically ill Anna hides his death in a desperate effort to ensure her own survival and suppress long-buried secrets.

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PRAISE FOR Monarchs of the Northeast Kingdom:Monarchs of the Northeast Kingdom has the hypnotic tone of a dream infused with the rich evocation of place and one woman’s circumstance. It is an utterly affecting combination.
— LIAM DURCAN, author of The Measure of DarknessIn this powerful debut novel, Hammons offers her audience a glance into an intimate portrait of one woman’s grief and journey towards self-sufficiency. Monarchs of the Northeast Kingdom is raw, emotional, and poignant. Hammons explores the ambiguity of human morality during illness and isolation. As the narrator (Anna) continues to prove her grit and ingenuity, readers experience triumph with her which is deeply felt. Monarchs twists the reader’s perspective as audiences grapple with the reality of a troubled narrator who neither comprehends her own strength or grasps the reality of her situation. Hammons rules over the pen, writing with a deep and honest understanding of the complexity of human emotion and psyche. — Burrowing Owl BooksChera Hammons writes fiction with the same lyricism that makes her poetry shine. Every sentence sings with grace and music. Monarchs of the Northeast Kingdom is a book you don't read so much as savor. — RICHARD KRAWIEC, author of Time SharingMonarchs of the Northeast Kingdom is particularly memorable for its close reading of the ways of animals, and for its evocation of place: a would-be pristine winter kingdom continually threatened by human arrogance, carelessness, and greed. This is an astonishingly mature first novel, suspenseful, haunted—and haunting—from start to finish. —A. G. MOJTABAI, author of Shine on MeOminous from its opening image—blood marring cozy domesticity--Monarchs of the Northeast Kingdom is a haunting beauty. Hammons's prose is tight as tripwire. A quiet madness unfolds and the narrative forces the reader to look and see what the most fragile among us are capable of. Her characters, both human and not, will be with me a long time. —KELLY SOKOL, author of The Unprotected

Chera Hammons

Maps of Injury, Sundress Publications, March 2020Winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of PoetryWinner of the Writers' League of Texas Discovery Award for Poetry

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In Maps of Injury, Chera Hammons offers a steady wisdom born from a body and a land under siege. As the speaker confronts chronic illness and the land of the Texas panhandle weathers drought, we are assured that "Someone will always teach us how to grieve." And these poems do just that with subtle beauty and stunning revelations. Hammons' lyric narratives sing in the face of difficult times and remind us to "let the dangerous world in."—SANDY LONGHORN, author of The Alchemy of My Mortal FormIn these spare, honest, and deeply thoughtful poems, Chera Hammons exhibits an ecological imagination that blends self and ecosystem – body and earth – to reflect on trauma, struggle, and survival. Like Stafford or Jeffers, Hammons is a nature poet endowed with a tragic sense of life, a careful observer for whom every landscape is internal. She shares with the animal world – the horse, the dog, the deer – a deep sympathy grounded in a common sorrow. “With every breath, then, let the dangerous world in,” she writes, which is exactly what this book does, presenting a place and a self that are both wide open and yet are anything but vacant. – BENJAMIN MYERS, author of Lapse AmericanaHow thankful I am for the integrity of poems so attentive to mixtures of beauty and damage! Miraculously, the necessary charting of loss never feels like a self-centered act, but a gesture spiraling outward, a reason to connect. As unsparing as her dry Texas environment, the poet notes how horses walk “calmly as nuns,” trusting they’ll be fed in winter, how wells fill from “lakes that were buried alive.” How the pelvic bone of a deer presents a tripping hazard, how empty the country is--and how full. I was moved and helped by these lyrics’ canny tenderness, a faithfulness that feels devotional: “Even while you think you can’t go on, the day carries you.”— JAN CLAUSEN, author of Veiled Spill: A SequenceIn Maps of Injury, Hammons threads together poems with an openhearted tenderness that turns each one into a prayer. On every page, the reader will find a reverence for the earth, as well as for all creatures, great and small, that live in Hammons’s internal and external landscapes. From joy to grief, from cow to tick, from parasite to horse, from discovery to loss, Hammons uses the beauty and tragedy of her world to say, I am trying again to learn how to live. If you want a book that will nourish the part of you that knows we are all connected, this is it. — ELENA GEORGIOU, author of Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants

Chera Hammons

The Traveler's Guide to Bomb City, Purple Flag Press, 2017Winner of the 2017 PEN Southwest Book Award (Poetry)
Finalist for the 2017 Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry

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"Amarillo, Texas, to many of those who pass through on their way to the 'postcard' mountain scenery of northern New Mexico and Colorado, is the flattest and ugliest place they have ever seen. If, however, they were blessed with the eyes and heightened sensibilities of Chera Hammons, they would be awakened to a world of endless beauty and mystery, a world which captivated 'literally' for over a year and 'spiritually' for a lifetime none other than the major American artist, Georgia O'Keeffe. Hammons's meticulously crafted poems peel away the layers of the ostensible 'otherness' of the natural world, revealing its kernels of mystical profundity to the wide-eyed astonishment of the reader. From grackles to abandoned puppies, tornadoes to tumbleweeds, raptors to horses, bomb manufacturing to sparrows, and human epiphanies to heartbreak, Hammons demonstrates time and time again, with consummate poetic skill, that she 'learned how to wring beauty / from anything she could.'" - LARRY D. THOMAS, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate and Member, Texas Institute of Letters"Hammons’ poems put me in mind of Sarah Appleton’s great, neglected, poem The Plenitude We Cry For. Stylistically speaking, they are very different. And Hammons’ empathic embrace of creature and landscape is softer, more wide-ranging, but both these poets are notable for precision and intensity, and attention---most particularly, the depth of their attention…[Hammons] prepares the way for the title and title poem, not only in 'culture & demographics' and ‘Teotwawki,' but foreshadowings in recurrent images of predators and prey, extreme winter, tornado and storm, violence explicit and implicit throughout. As she says on p.77: 'the destruction has always been there.' I can see it now. This is very, very good work." - A.G. MOJTABAI, author of Blessed Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas and recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature

Chera Hammons

Recycled Explosions

Recycled Explotions, Ink Brush Press, 2016

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The Texas Institute of Letters named Recycled Explosions a finalist for the 2016 best first book of poetry by a Texan."Chera Hammons’ Recycled Explosions places us in an elusive and at times frightening narrative, moving along Judas-filled landscapes where we may or may not 'find a way back to what [we] know.' Perhaps whatever inheritance we once had—or believed in—is gone. Still, Hammons 'keeps vigil.' Her poems remind us that, despite the times we live in, we seek to be blessed, even if the angel we wrestle turns out to be only a 'reflection' of ourselves." - JEFF HARDIN, author of Notes for a Praise Book and Restoring the Narrative

Chera Hammons

Amaranthine Hour

Amaranthine Hour, Jacar Press, 2012Winner of the 2012 Jacar Press Chapbook Award

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"The poems are both vibrant and somehow modest at the same time, wonderfully reflective. The speaker has earned maturity and understanding yet realizes that even this achievement has its limits and is ephemeral. The mildly eccentric, at times, lineation works here, as do subtle repetitions throughout the well-patterned and arranged manuscript. Teeters at the brink of sadness but refuses to give in to it. Wonderful work." - JOHN HOPPENTHALER, author of Anticipate the Coming Reservoir and Lives of Water"Chera Hammons' Amaranthine Hour is an elegant meditation on the mysteries of nature - personal experience - and the soul - in the redemptive inventive human act of naming the invisible, and the formerly unnameable. A rich phenomenological grappling with grief, mortality, love, and the violence of loss." - 'ANNAH SOBELMAN, author of In the Bee Latitudes and The Tulip Sacrament

Chera Hammons

Bio

Chera Hammons is a winner of the 2017 PEN Southwest Book Award through PEN Texas and the 2020 Helen C. Smith Memorial Award through the Texas Institute of Letters. She holds an MFA from Goddard College and recently served as Writer-in-Residence at West Texas A&M University. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Baltimore Review, Foundry, The Penn Review, Pleiades, Poetry, Rattle, The Southern Review, The Sun, The Texas Observer, Tupelo Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry chapbook Amaranthine Hour received the 2012 Jacar Press Chapbook Award. Poetry collections include Recycled Explosions, The Traveler's Guide to Bomb City, and Maps of Injury. Her debut novel, Monarchs of the Northeast Kingdom, is available through Torrey House Press. She is a member of the editorial board of poetry journal One. She often writes about chronic illness and invisible disability, horses, and the unique landscape of the Texas panhandle, where she resides.

Amaranthine Hour

Awards and Nominations

Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers:
2001, Poetry, Second PlaceTexas Institute of Letters:
2016, Bob Bush Memorial Award for Poetry, Finalist
2020, Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of PoetryNew England Poetry Club:
2011, Barbara Bradley Poetry Award
2012, Der-Hovanessian Translation Award, Honorable Mention2012 Jacar Press Chapbook Competition WinnerCommon Good Books Poetry Contest (Garrison Keillor): "Gratitude"
2016, Second PlaceEmily Stauffer Poetry Prize:
2017, First PlacePEN Texas:
2017, Southwest Book Award (Poetry)The Lascaux Review:
2017, Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry, FinalistBest of the Net nominations:
2018, "The Capacity for Malignancy is Ancient"
2019, "Trace Elements"2019 Pushcart nominee for "Locoweed" (San Pedro River Review, nominated by a previous Pushcart recipient)

Chera Hammons

Email Chera directly to request books, a poetry reading or writing workshop, a manuscript consultation, or interviews.Interested parties may also connect with her "socially" on Facebook, LinkedIn, and the Poets & Writers directory. Her oft-neglected blog can be found languishing here.

Amaranthine Hour