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Hooked Through
Hooked Through studies violence--of suicide, of nature, of our "possum heart," of our "last days." Anything can destroy, deconstruct, or devour the body--teeth, tongues, bullets, bugs, the sun--and the body grows, hatches, disappears and transforms into jerking flesh on a hook or fingers into stems or a spine into a tree or bones into "a single word." And yet the speaker, while forcibly fragmented, survives and is able to discern the smallest beauty like the outline of a wing, birds leaving an "empty chest," a pretty "sliver of sky" that can be fed on. When I read Sara Moore Wagner's poetry, I am forced to re-examine all I thought I knew. This is haunting, magical, brave work from a poet of great power, and I am thankful her poems exist--a true voice of her post-9/11 generation.
--Kelly Moffett, author of Bird Blind (Tebot Bach, 2017) & others
Sara Wagner's poems reveal an astonishing idea of interiority. And the exterior world is no less odd, as this poet perceives it: "Listen to the sound of the moon whisk / through the sky like a thrown pumpkin." The surreality of these poems is rooted, though, in the real, with the loss of the poet's grandfather to a violent suicide serving as the spark that ignites the charge. As Wagner writes in "After the Burial," in a moment where she visits a creek with her child, "One day we'll catch our deaths // with cupped hands, / as we do the avalanche / of minnows." Wagner has looked deep inside of us, and she has found piles of dust, fragments of tooth, the occasional skittering animal, and, most ominously, a barbed hook, always pulling us from our element into another, even as we try to resist. Her heartbreakingly innovative thinking about loss kept me on the line, and ultimately reeled me in.
--Karen Craigo, author of the poetry collections No More Milk (Sundress, 2016) & blogger at Better View of the Moon
--Kelly Moffett, author of Bird Blind (Tebot Bach, 2017) & others
Sara Wagner's poems reveal an astonishing idea of interiority. And the exterior world is no less odd, as this poet perceives it: "Listen to the sound of the moon whisk / through the sky like a thrown pumpkin." The surreality of these poems is rooted, though, in the real, with the loss of the poet's grandfather to a violent suicide serving as the spark that ignites the charge. As Wagner writes in "After the Burial," in a moment where she visits a creek with her child, "One day we'll catch our deaths // with cupped hands, / as we do the avalanche / of minnows." Wagner has looked deep inside of us, and she has found piles of dust, fragments of tooth, the occasional skittering animal, and, most ominously, a barbed hook, always pulling us from our element into another, even as we try to resist. Her heartbreakingly innovative thinking about loss kept me on the line, and ultimately reeled me in.
--Karen Craigo, author of the poetry collections No More Milk (Sundress, 2016) & blogger at Better View of the Moon
46 pages, Paperback
Published February 28, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 15, 2022
I read this collection in one sitting, and oh my goodness, what a treat.
April 26, 2017
Death is nothing like
the stories I will keep
telling you, but neither is life.
Sara Moore Wagner’s thin collection of poetry, hooked through, is a quick yet satisfying read. With little more than 20 pages of poems, Wagner exposes the fine line between what is real and what is perceived as real—what stories are more real than reality. At moments, the poems feel as though they are a tool for explaining a suicide to a young child – other times, an adult grieving through a history filled with death, but also with the life of those left behind. This is a collection saturated with masterful imagery – I highly recommend.
Death turns us all into fishes,
green and gasping.
the stories I will keep
telling you, but neither is life.
Sara Moore Wagner’s thin collection of poetry, hooked through, is a quick yet satisfying read. With little more than 20 pages of poems, Wagner exposes the fine line between what is real and what is perceived as real—what stories are more real than reality. At moments, the poems feel as though they are a tool for explaining a suicide to a young child – other times, an adult grieving through a history filled with death, but also with the life of those left behind. This is a collection saturated with masterful imagery – I highly recommend.
Death turns us all into fishes,
green and gasping.
June 19, 2018
to not die is what I mean. – {from} I Have No Love For Images
*
It was snowing. My teeth had vanished. I held this, hooked through, by Sara Moore Wagner. I read it then
and heard it when it said that death won’t keep still
and believed it when it suggested that maybe a school of fish is the tattooed decoy of pain’s removal
and I prayed humanly when its verse prodded objectification to give gulf its weight in animal.
Wagner is a poet who brings to her language the gift of both legend and locality. Instead of gutting one story to stomach another, she foregoes image worship and rewrites the ghosted psalm.
*
It was snowing. My teeth had vanished. I held this, hooked through, by Sara Moore Wagner. I read it then
and heard it when it said that death won’t keep still
and believed it when it suggested that maybe a school of fish is the tattooed decoy of pain’s removal
and I prayed humanly when its verse prodded objectification to give gulf its weight in animal.
Wagner is a poet who brings to her language the gift of both legend and locality. Instead of gutting one story to stomach another, she foregoes image worship and rewrites the ghosted psalm.
May 30, 2018
A beautiful and heartbreaking poetic narrative of losing someone you love and finding yourself in the world. Hooked Through is very much worth the read. Great images and language.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews