Cathryn Hankla grew up in the Virginia coalfields, in Richlands, where her mother worked at the local library. She has been a voracious reader throughout her life, and for decades has been a creative writing professor for the outstanding writing program at Hollins College near Roanoke. This is her lucky thirteenth book of fiction and primarily poetry. Cathryn Hankla’s “poems contemplate and honor the largest questions. The multiverse of this quietly mind-blowing book is composed of imagined constellations. There’s a profound delicacy throughout, a candor tempered by compassion Reticence has seldom seemed so provocative or quietude so dazzling.” – Alice Fulton. “The patterns that she creates . . . spiral upward from earthbound fact and observation to stellar connections and intuitions . . . .[and] result in poems of lyric capaciousness, thoughtful, intricate, and enticing.” Carol Moldaw. “The finely crafted poems in Cathryn Hankla’s Galaxies have a quiet power, a solid emotional core enhanced by playful language that never fails to attract the ear. Both earthly and otherworldly, the poems contained here make lovely leaps of sound and sense, but always return to their task of comprehending the infinite galaxies that hold and define us.” – Wyn Cooper.
Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2017. 66 pages. Trade paperback