The Holy or the Broken Hallelujah

<p class=ql-align-justify>In this impressive first collection Kristina Hakanson gives us-in both free verse and lyric prose forms-poems of considerable range and power most poignantly those about her beloved father's terminal illness. In one she makes this striking and quintessentially human confession: I'm about to say goodbye / to my bedridden father / the first man I loved / the only one whose heart I refuse to break / ashamed that I ever did / if I ever did. / I'm sure I did. Hakanson's work evokes a fraught yet wrenchingly beautiful world-a heaven's underside in which Each sorrow converted to ice / grows warm in the palm of your hand.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong>-Paulann Petersen </strong>Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>Both elegiac and celebratory these poems derive their strength from the real world around us: wooden spoons egg-beaters a coffee cup the teeth of a harrow-touched here and there by an element of the surreal (a wolf in a cello). I admire their clean language and plainspoken balance from the mundane to the eternal-their realization that Whole lives are lived on the dirt/ which long ago came from the stars.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong>-Joseph Millar</strong></p><p><br></p>