Background
Hankla, Cathryn was born on March 20, 1958 in Richlands, Virginia, United States. Daughter of Alden Staley and Joyce Hankla.
( Cathryn Hankla's first novel is an engaging coming-of-a...)
Cathryn Hankla's first novel is an engaging coming-of-age story set in the small Appalachian mining town of Poorwater, Virginia. It is the summer of 1968, and the narrator, inquisitive ten-year-old Dorie Parks, is getting ready to enter fifth grade when her errant older brother Willie returns to town. A religious fanatic and suspected drug user, Willie represents to the residents of Poorwater the hippie counterculture that threatens their conservative town, and his return is the catalyst for a string of strange and sometimes tragic events. Dorie's father, a miner, begins a dangerous labor rights crusade after a mining accident leaves a close friend dead. Dorie struggles to understand the class differences that separate "holler kids" and trailer park children like herself from her wealthy friend Betty. Hankla's graceful writing evokes the wonder and growing sophistication of a young girl on the verge of adolescence and an unknown future. A Blue Moon in Poorwater offers a moving yet unsentimental slice of life in Appalachian, Virginia.
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( Humorous, quirky, and spiritually meditative by turns, ...)
Humorous, quirky, and spiritually meditative by turns, Cathryn Hankla's prose poems move by associative leaps and take their inspirations from cultural and personal icons. A shadow narrative moors the collection in the perspective of a woman who survives a difficult childhood to eventually comprehend the paradoxes of adult life and whose journeys into her heritage bring her to a fuller realization of her place in the world. Travels to Prague and Paris, allusions to literary, spiritual, artistic, and political figures, local and familial lore -- all become ready touchstones for the revelation of feeling and reevaluations of identity and the nature of freedom. While recognizing the danger in exploration, Hankla takes pleasure in questioning the status quo and takes issue with those who sidestep emotional or intellectual adversities by affecting apathy. In the title poem, the huge cache of the Louvre is searched, not for the famed Mona Lisa or Egyptian antiquities, but in a metaphorical quest for something now forever lost -- a nation's collective naoveti, destroyed with Kennedy's assassination, from the gunman's nest in what was then the Texas School Book Depository. Intimate and unusual, amusing and moving, Texas School Book Depository is a truly wondrous offering.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807125415/?tag=2022091-20
(In poems of mature range and facility, Cathryn Hankla add...)
In poems of mature range and facility, Cathryn Hankla addressed with humor and wonder the many tensions we must battle in forging both relationships and the self amidst the weight of our collective history. She discovers likeness in seemingly disparate subjects--animal and human, seen and unseen, speech and silence, the pardoned and the condemned--applying the reason of the heart and spirit in a reconciliation of the many dissonances life presents. Always nimble, intelligent, and truthful, these poems speak to what is most elusive and yet most valuable in being human.
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( In this powerful poetic sequence wrought of deft tercet...)
In this powerful poetic sequence wrought of deft tercets, Cathryn Hankla navigates the slippery, ever-changing territory between art and life. The death of the poet's father by car accident is the focal event for the collection, and all the poems reflect the collision of the physical and transcendent. Whether describing the abandoned nest of a Carolina wren or the excavation of the Kennewick Man, Hankla sounds a muted grief in these lines. But with wit, channeled through language and rhythm, the poet keeps traveling forward: by car and by camel, from San Francisco to Spain, with many stops between. As she takes us with her, finally off the map into regions of the interior, we discover what is at once weighty and wondrous, like ghostly snapshots left behind in a camera: "Everything and everyone who have carried / Us to this place." Only Thyme I pull you out by the roots, fierce love, But you still smell of thyme and lemon. What were you thinking, to die Instead of wintering, after so many seasons Of spring shoots and new greening? Surely your gnarled, woody fibers Are more alive than they look. Yet after patient weeks of rain, nothing Grows except the cutting I potted, A woolly patch dwarfed by purple basil. Making space for new plants, I pull up Withered stems, baring your roots, and The scent runs through me, like music Pouring through a sieve Of consciousness, leaving only this. "Only Thyme" published in Last Exposures: A Sequence of Poems by Cathryn Hankla. Copyright 2004 by Cathryn Hankla. All rights reserved.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807129488/?tag=2022091-20
Hankla, Cathryn was born on March 20, 1958 in Richlands, Virginia, United States. Daughter of Alden Staley and Joyce Hankla.
Bachelor, Hollins College, Roanoke, Virginia, 1980. Master of Arts, Hollins College, 1982.
Professor English Hollins University, Roanoke, since 1983. Lecturer fiction writing University Virginia, Charlottesville, 1985. Writer-in-residence Randolph Macon Woman's College, Lynchburg, Virginia, 1987.
Visiting assistant professor English Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia, 1989-1991.
(In poems of mature range and facility, Cathryn Hankla add...)
( Humorous, quirky, and spiritually meditative by turns, ...)
( In this powerful poetic sequence wrought of deft tercet...)
( Cathryn Hankla's first novel is an engaging coming-of-a...)
(Book by Hankla, Cathryn)
(Book by Hankla, Cathryn)
Author: Phenomena, 1983, Learning the Mother Tongue, 1987, A Blue Moon in Poorwater, 1988, Afterimages, 1991, Negative History, 1997, Texas School Book Depository, 2000, Poems for the Pardoned, 2002, Emerald City Blues, 2002, The Land Between, 2003, Last Exposures, 2004. Contributor articles to professional jours.
Member Academy American Poets, Authors Guild, Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association American Center, Phi Beta Kappa, Omicron Delta Kappa.