Member Janice Northerns shares her reviews on Goodreads and has given us permission to share them here! Thank you, Janice, for making the time to share the books you love.
In FLINT & FIRE, published by The Word Works in 2019, Lisa Hase-Jackson delves into complicated family relationships between parent and child, spouses, and ex-spouses. Her poetry is spare and economical and yet packed with concrete details and imagery. The resulting work is personal, but the stories and the scenes are ones that readers can relate to.
In “Letter to My Daughter,” Hase-Jackson describes a day spent fishing with her husband and young son, a day that ends with the birth of the daughter. She writes “It was the kind of idyllic day that makes / you think you’ve figured out something about life,” and includes evocative details like these: “We unloaded fishing rods and tackle, / the twitching stringed fish from the bed of the truck.” But even in this “idyllic” poem, hints of a crumbling marriage create tension, as the writer adds “and though your father drank, / it wasn’t much, his speech not too slurred.”
That tension threads its way through most of the book. In “Vestigial,” the marriage has ended and she describes her relation to her ex-husband like this: “I am a cryptic text from your ex.” The text includes a picture of a tree that she knows he will not recognize, “though it looks like the / honey locust you planted.” She ends the poem by contrasting how little she means to him with the hopes they perhaps once shared: “a past / when life seemed as lucid, / as promising, / as sapling roots reaching / down through fertile soil.”
While Hase-Jackson creates emotion-packed narratives, her work is also very much a poetry of place. In FLINT & FIRE we get the flavor of highways and roadside motels, of farms and cities, of Topeka and Kansas City and Albuquerque. We get the flavor of life.
In “Letter to My Daughter,” Hase-Jackson describes a day spent fishing with her husband and young son, a day that ends with the birth of the daughter. She writes “It was the kind of idyllic day that makes / you think you’ve figured out something about life,” and includes evocative details like these: “We unloaded fishing rods and tackle, / the twitching stringed fish from the bed of the truck.” But even in this “idyllic” poem, hints of a crumbling marriage create tension, as the writer adds “and though your father drank, / it wasn’t much, his speech not too slurred.”
That tension threads its way through most of the book. In “Vestigial,” the marriage has ended and she describes her relation to her ex-husband like this: “I am a cryptic text from your ex.” The text includes a picture of a tree that she knows he will not recognize, “though it looks like the / honey locust you planted.” She ends the poem by contrasting how little she means to him with the hopes they perhaps once shared: “a past / when life seemed as lucid, / as promising, / as sapling roots reaching / down through fertile soil.”
While Hase-Jackson creates emotion-packed narratives, her work is also very much a poetry of place. In FLINT & FIRE we get the flavor of highways and roadside motels, of farms and cities, of Topeka and Kansas City and Albuquerque. We get the flavor of life.
A local donor has offered the following challenge to Kansas Authors Club members. Every #ReadLocalKS submission to our website from now through December 1 will be entered into a drawing for a $50 gift certificate to Bookshop.org.
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