Description
John Hennessy’s Exit Garden State never strays far from family life as it ranges from childhood in New Jersey’s industrial corridor to mid-life in the woods of New England, from Rahway prison’s sullen grey dome, Newark’s steel flyway, to Lisbon’s labyrinths and miradouros, from the smooth volcanic peaks of the Cyclades to his dead in Dublin. Keenly mindful of their ancestors and the immigrations that have brought them here, the speakers of these poems, their various personae, explore the knots of familial experience, what it’s like to be both parent and child simultaneously, to be embraced by family as well as to lose it, to celebrate kinship and endure its sorrows and changes. Hennessy remains rooted in the propulsive energy of his lines, the clarity of his craft, while traversing emotional territory as broad as the book’s geography.
John Hennessy is the author of two previous collections, Coney Island Pilgrims (Ashland Poetry Press) and Bridge and Tunnel (Turning Point Books), and his poems appear in The Best American Poetry 2024, The Believer, The New Republic, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Yale Review. With Ostap Kin he is the translator of A New Orthography (also from Lost Horse Press), selected poems by Serhiy Zhadan, finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and co-winner of the Derek Walcott Prize, the anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature), and Set Change, selected poems by Yuri Andrukhovych (NYRB/Poets Series). Hennessy is the poetry editor of The Common and teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
“The tonal and formal range of these poems, now employing deliberate syntactic twists, now straightforward speech, and always a distinctive musicality, show us a poet with a remarkable gift to convey the ways that strong feeling can lead to wisdom.”—Mary Jo Salter, author of Zoom Rooms: Poems
“Vulnerable and formally dexterous, this fine collection manages to be haunted by personal history and all of that which we stand to inherit, and yet brimming, somehow, with hope.”—Nathan McClain, author of Previously Owned
EXCERPT
BACK HOME
Jack-pine cones, maple leaves, red tail-feathers
from a startled hawk—she filled her purse
with figments from the bulldozed woods.
Ice in the birdbath, a frozen millet stick.
Paint peeling from deck rails was too thick
to ignore. The colors matched her moods,
grey-blue on top, white oak below. The nurse
for evening meds, and maid at angelus. Red leathers
scuffed, spit-shined, roughed up again, the heels
a stack of wooden nickels. Mother’s meals
grew smaller every day, rice grain, breadcrumb,
soon she’d fit on the head of a pin, too frail
to hold a lapdog, Siamese cat, the dumb
and artless jib that kept her rigging, sail
set to a constant circling—sickroom, kitchen, bath.
Propped up on pillows, mother watched the last
blackbirds harass the feeder. She folded sums
across her thoughts. Reckonings. Junk mail.
The clacking in the hall, her favorite boots,
hair still heavy on her shoulders, dark, loose.
