Maps of Injury, Sundress Publications, March 2020
Winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry
Available to purchase here.
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 Form
In 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 Americana
How 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 Sequence
In 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
Winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry
Available to purchase here.
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 Form
In 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 Americana
How 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 Sequence
In 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
The Traveler's Guide to Bomb City, Purple Flag Press, January 2017
Winner of the 2017 PEN Southwest Book Award (Poetry)
Finalist for the 2017 Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry
Available to purchase here.
"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
Winner of the 2017 PEN Southwest Book Award (Poetry)
Finalist for the 2017 Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry
Available to purchase here.
"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
Recycled Explosions, Ink Brush Press, 2016
Available to purchase here.
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
Available to purchase here.
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
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Amaranthine Hour, Jacar Press, 2012: Winner of the 2012 Jacar Press Chapbook Award
Available to purchase here. "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 A Kindle version is available on Amazon for those who read with electricity. |