The Holy or the Broken Hallelujah

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." Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita 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".