Larks: Poems

by Hannah VanderHart, Han VanderHart

The core of Larks is rural and mythic and true, existential and domestic, tender while full of sharp grief and documentation. Circling genealogies of silence and harm in a southern family, Larks centers on the relationship and memories of three sisters and Ovid’s telling of Philomel. In a landscape inhabited as much by farm animals (cows, goats, chickens, and barn kittens) as by the family, the lyric poem parses and articulates the self’s history—from the experience of a sister’s home birth to the traumatic erasure (and recovery) of the speaker’s memory. A work of poetic memoir, Larks asks if poetry can hold the heaviest truths we carry. The answer is a resounding yes.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published March 11, 2025

About the author

Han VanderHart is a queer, Southern writer who grew up in rural Virginia and now lives in Durham, North Carolina. Their manuscript Larks was recently selected by Chanda Feldman as the recipient of the 2024 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, and is forthcoming from Ohio University Press in 2025. Han is also the author of the poetry chapbook Hands like Birds (Ethel Zine Press, 2019) and the poetry collection What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, Spring 2021). They hold an MFA in poetry from George Mason University and an MA in English from Georgetown, where they worked with Carolyn Forché at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. In 2019, Han received their PhD in English from Duke University and defended the dissertation Gender and Collaboration in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry. Han’s poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared in Poetry Daily, The Boston Globe, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, AGNI, Southern Humanities Review, Cave Wall, Chattahoochee Review, Poetry Northwest, Poetry International, RHINO Poetry, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Their works-in-progress include the poetry collection Thou Wast Mild and Lovely and the essay collection Unlearning Mastery. Han edits Moist Poetry Journal, hosts Of Poetry Podcast, and is the co-founding editor and publisher of the poetry press River River Books alongside Amorak Huey.

Reviews

[Amorak Huey · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best, most devastating, most gorgeous book of poems I’ll read this year. This one will rewrite your soul. It will make you set down the book between poems to catch your breath.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are wonders, tough and tender, filled with precise and delicious and disturbing images, details, emotions. VanderHart is a poet of tremendous attention and attentiveness. This book will fill you with awe as you encounter the particular memories, horrible and sweet, of a southern family, and the wider marvels of nature, art, love, the divine.

[Eleanor · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review of Larks was published in print in the fall 2025 issue of Door = Jar. Here's a preview:

Larks (Ohio University Press, 2025) is Han VanderHart’s second poetry collection and the winner of the 2024 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. I began avidly reading VanderHart’s work last year, so I was thrilled to hear they were publishing a book in 2025—and I was not disappointed. Unflinching and dazzling, Larks is a powerful exploration of the process of healing from lifelong trauma.

Larks chronicles VanderHart’s experience growing up in the rural South and the lingering effects, many years later, of the violence and abuse they witnessed. While VanderHart does write briefly about such activities as cuddling barn kittens and weaving clover chains, their childhood was far from the mythic ideal of rural life. In “Isabel,” they recall the aftermath of Hurricane Isabel in 2003:

When Isabel blew the oaks around
us sideways— no light. No water
pumped from our well. We carried
five-gallon buckets from the pond
to the house, filled the toilet bowls.
I wore overalls. My hair in braids.
For nine days, home was a dark
dream and hurricane lamps. (8)

And in “Partial List of Hauntings,” they remember “How white everything was, from / neighbors to church, to storybooks— / like on cloudy days when / the sky is all glare.” (11) Throughout Larks, VanderHart evokes the ominous, claustrophobic atmosphere of their childhood home. While reading this book, my hair stood on end. I felt the heat of beady eyes watching me.

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My review won the 2025 Door is a Jar Award for Book Reviews. In celebration, the full text is now available to read for free online here.

[Burgi Zenhaeusern · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems in Larks have a hard story to tell. They circle it cautiously with allusions and imagery that only reveals itself as such in the course of reading. Author and speaker seem to find the words simultaneously and as readers we're let in on an intimate journey. Larks is so deeply vulnerable and honest in its explorations of wanting and not wanting to remember, of the hermetic prison a family can be and the love in it, of the breaking away from a child's unknowing normalcy to looking back in adulthood and recognizing pain and trauma, the different turning points. These poems found the words to speak truthfully to the speaker's self. This is what poetry can do. Larks shows us how.

[Rachel Edelman · Rating 5 out of 5]

LARKS had me spellbound in its grip. The poems themselves are spare, lyrical, elliptical. They cohere into a mythic world full of intuitive knowing, both holding and withholding. I'm totally blown away.

[Ann Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

This gorgeous collection holds devastating power that slowly builds and burns. Beauty and pain sit together in these poems so masterfully. I couldn’t put this collection down, and now that I’ve finished it, I want to spend more time with the poems.

[Sabne Raznik · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://sabneraznik.blogspot.com/2025...

[Wendy Wisner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lush, searing, vulnerable, painful, gorgeous poems. Highly recommend.

[sylas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Again, maybe I am a person who just can't like most poetry?