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Stray Harbor
Stray Harbor is a collection that helps us remember what it is like to discover the world for the first time. It is a tender meditation on how we learn to love our family and how we learn to love ourselves. Rage Hezekiah has given us a stunning debut, one that signals we’re only at the beginning of what promises to be a remarkable literary life.
Clint Smith, author of Counting Descent
Hezekiah summons the power of water as we learn to swim and learn to drown in her debut work, Stray Harbor. She introduces us to the fabled Feminist Safe House where her mother taught her the endurance of womanhood, a journey that first requires devastation: “you teach the child / what it is to drown / so she’ll know / to save herself.” She leaves us a bit broken on the shore, that transitional place where the tides invite intoxication and a need to witness what in our living requires abandon. This is an important debut collection.
Amber Flora Thomas, author of Red Channel in the Rupture, The Rabbits Could
Sing, and Eye of Water
Stray Harbor invites the reader back into the body, where we find both lonesomeness and abundance. Here, we are called to bear witness to a child who, at nine, “understand[s] the solitude of the cove before dawn,” a father who, “surrenders his fierceness” in water, and a mother in search of reclamation and healing. In a lyric so incredibly tender and finely tuned to the sonic beauty of language, Rage Hezekiah invites her reader to delight in the queer beauty of life, the “unexpected coven” reclaiming “the bellow of our voices,” a woman “head bowed/in reverence to her own/powerful hands,/summoning song.” What a song has been summoned here. What a blessed offering, this book, to the weary soul.
Brionne Janae, author of After Jubilee
Clint Smith, author of Counting Descent
Hezekiah summons the power of water as we learn to swim and learn to drown in her debut work, Stray Harbor. She introduces us to the fabled Feminist Safe House where her mother taught her the endurance of womanhood, a journey that first requires devastation: “you teach the child / what it is to drown / so she’ll know / to save herself.” She leaves us a bit broken on the shore, that transitional place where the tides invite intoxication and a need to witness what in our living requires abandon. This is an important debut collection.
Amber Flora Thomas, author of Red Channel in the Rupture, The Rabbits Could
Sing, and Eye of Water
Stray Harbor invites the reader back into the body, where we find both lonesomeness and abundance. Here, we are called to bear witness to a child who, at nine, “understand[s] the solitude of the cove before dawn,” a father who, “surrenders his fierceness” in water, and a mother in search of reclamation and healing. In a lyric so incredibly tender and finely tuned to the sonic beauty of language, Rage Hezekiah invites her reader to delight in the queer beauty of life, the “unexpected coven” reclaiming “the bellow of our voices,” a woman “head bowed/in reverence to her own/powerful hands,/summoning song.” What a song has been summoned here. What a blessed offering, this book, to the weary soul.
Brionne Janae, author of After Jubilee
- GenresPoetry
78 pages, Paperback
First published August 29, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 3, 2021
This volume is nicely fleshed out from Hezekiah's chapbook, Unslakable. Favorite poems:
Layers
Tinctures
[Love the ending of Barn Shoes: "finding home in their own down"]
Botany
Dozen
Empire Beauty School
Androgyny
Autumn
Our Bike Trip
I was struck by the last line in several of these poems, which had a Rilke/James Wright feel--a sudden epiphany upon meditation of something:
"the last great year of our imagination" (February Cove)
"I want it all for as long as it will last" (Psilocybin)
"'I'll never know', I thought, 'who's capable of what'" (Life Science)
Layers
Tinctures
[Love the ending of Barn Shoes: "finding home in their own down"]
Botany
Dozen
Empire Beauty School
Androgyny
Autumn
Our Bike Trip
I was struck by the last line in several of these poems, which had a Rilke/James Wright feel--a sudden epiphany upon meditation of something:
"the last great year of our imagination" (February Cove)
"I want it all for as long as it will last" (Psilocybin)
"'I'll never know', I thought, 'who's capable of what'" (Life Science)
May 6, 2023
Love the additions to this collection as well as those that were found in unslakable. Incredible poetry 10/10 would recommend
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews