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

Poetry

Novels

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

Birds of America, The Dial Press, 2026

An evocative, uplifting, and thoughtfully illustrated collection of poems steeped in the natural world, examining life and healing in the aftermath of trauma.What does it mean to love someone, and to love the world, when what we love is vanishing? In Birds of America, award-winning poet Chera Hammons reckons with the intersection of personal violence and the violence humans have wrought upon our planet and explores the beauty that remains among the ruins. With graceful lyricism, she translates seemingly mundane scenes from the natural world—two eagles locked together in a tandem dive, the fresh sweetness of wild onions—into exquisite revelations of human feeling, inviting us to glimpse the hidden magic of the everyday.For anyone who struggles to remain grounded when it feels like the world is falling apart, each poem in Birds of America offers a meditative lens with which to view the fraught relationships we have with the living beings around us, which come to life through exquisite artwork by acclaimed illustrator Sophie Lucido Johnson. Hammons encourages us to love fiercely, to embrace a future where our damage teaches us to be kinder people, and to never give up on the beauty of our world.

“How much I enjoyed Chera Hammons’s Birds of America. It’s gorgeous, witty, harrowing and moving!" — RON CHARLES"These poems move seamlessly between the wonder of the natural world and dissonance of our domestic lives. They ask that we hold them together and consider what each might teach us. I will be thinking about these poems for a long time." — CLINT SMITH, author of Above Ground and How the Word Is Passed"The poems sing like the titular animals and probe again and again at our own animal hearts. They ask questions that hurt and offer beauty, heartbreak, and balm." — JOSÉ OLIVAREZ, author of Promises of Gold"Hammons’s insight gives new voice to birds, striking just the right chord when a morning needs to get off on the right note, or an evening needs centering before slumber." — CARL SAFINA, author of Alfie and Me"These poems ruffle, they linger, and at all costs, they remember the thorny trail that a woman must take to survive." — OLIVIA GATWOOD, author of Life of the Party"These poems weave together natural history with family history, where drought, extinction, and economic precariousness mirror the risks carried by bodies, animal and human alike. Hammons excels at holding contradiction: wanting the storm and fearing it, loving what may be lost, knowing that care itself can also wound. She renders attention as a kind of labor, and hope as something earned rather than promised." — TAYLOR MALI, author of The Whetting Stone"Birds of America is a pliant, wise clarion collection that draws on the natural world to offer testimony, witness, and, ultimately, healing. This is a birder’s guide to survival, with the poet as our binoculars—trained outward toward the sky and inward toward the most vulnerable chambers of the heart." — JENNIFER GIVHAN, author of Belly to the Brutal and Salt Bones"In Birds of America, Chera Hammons explores with grace the small majesties and big complications of our exquisite, suffering planet. Holding fast to the beauty and the pain and the truth and the stories, Hammons enacts the great human challenge of holding hopelessness and hope together, and making something of both." — CARRIE FOUNTAIN, author of The Life

Chera Hammons

Salvage List, Belle Point Press, 2025

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Salvage List considers the gravity of inheritance in its most visceral and primal forms. In equal turns quietly meditative and vividly present to the natural world, these poems enchant as they seek to navigate the difficulties of inhabiting our failing bodies in a failing world. Whether tending to animals in the Texas Panhandle or recalling the weight of long-held grief, Chera Hammons remains a powerful voice in this new collection.

“With tender elegance, and a clear, frank eye and voice, Chera Hammons in Salvage List explores ‘the many ways to be alive.’ These richly endearing poems glimmer with multiple windows and doors—changing seasons, relationship with illness, running mares, yucca plants. They feel like instant friends.”
— NAOMI SHIHAB NYE“Chera Hammons’ Salvage List is ripe with myriad nests: cabbage moths practicing autosarcophagy in preparation for flight, a hatchery of rainbow trout, condominiums constructed by blue wasps to imprison soon-to-be-devoured orb weavers, a grandmother’s flashy woven wool coat, a baby cottontail’s nest, and finally, as all true children of the Texas Panhandle know, Mason Jars, for putting food by. Yet of all of these sequences of nested miracles, the one that strikes this reader the sharpest, is the series including ‘Chupacabra,’ ‘The Making of the Horse,’ ‘Mustang,’ ‘Red Mare,’ and ‘Trespasses.’ For it is these that illustrate Hammon’s wisdom (and the wisdom of all poets), that ‘now we are strung together of mismatched pieces, / and those who bore us bestow us with our names / as another once named / what had been found in a garden, all those teeming wild and baffled beasts,’ that we might nest within our shared and gorgeous tongues.”
— GARY WORTH MOODY, author of The Burnings, co-winner of the New Mexico / Arizona Book Award in Poetry“It’s said that the oldest souls are those who agree to shoulder heaps of trauma in their next life, ailing in body or spirit, walking among us as wounded healers. In Chera Hammons’ breathtaking new collection, Salvage List, it’s the body that ails amid a prickly landscape of locoweed, yucca spikes, and land hurricanes in the Texas Panhandle. Although illness walks beside her in the supermarket and they argue as couples do, although she knows the inhospitable earth will swallow the aching bones of her old horses and donkeys as well as her own, there is always mercy. There is the unspoken bargain with the barren land and its feral shadows: let us abide together in a semblance of healing and survival, saying, ‘I am broken, choose me.’ As we all are. As we all must, finally, choose what to salvage of our own woundedness in this wild, drought-hardened world that we love despite ourselves.”
— LINDA PARSONS, author of Valediction: Poems and Prose

Chera Hammons

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 Explosions, 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 formerly served as writer-in-residence at West Texas A&M University. Her work, which is rooted in love for the natural world, appears in Baltimore Review, Pleiades, Poetry, Rattle, The Southern Review, The Sun, The Texas Observer, and elsewhere. She lives on the windswept prairies of the Texas Panhandle. In her free time, she enjoys reading, birdwatching, spending time with her horses and donkeys, and caring for her houseplant collection, which is slowly but surely taking over her entire living space.

Amaranthine Hour

Awards and Nominations

Texas Institute of Letters:
2016, Bob Bush Memorial Award for Poetry, Finalist
2020, Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of PoetryPEN Texas:
2017, Southwest Book Award (Poetry)Writers' League of Texas:
2020 Discovery Award (Poetry)Best 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)Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers:
2001, Poetry, Second Place2012 Jacar Press Chapbook Competition Winner

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, Instagram, and the Poets & Writers directory. Chera also offers a free newsletter, The Hurt and the Miracle, on Substack.

Amaranthine Hour