- 2008 CWW
Posner Poetry Book Award, Honorable Mention
In The House of Marriage, Erin Hanusa searches ruthlessly
and compassionately for deep and strange truth in a world
we only believe we know. Whether set in a field in Tennessee,
the lunar beauty of Egypt's White Desert, or a rain-soaked
Plymouth on a midwestern highway, Hanusa's passionate, candid
verse reconciles longing with understanding. The opening poems
deal with objects close and familiar: animals, landscapes,
and the body. Later poems trace an arc of familial betrayal
and forgiveness, while others spiral through lyric, erotic
mystery. Yet each of these transcendent poems is ultimately
concerned with "knowing the finite ways we possess / to love,
/ in learning them all." With this remarkable debut, Hanusa
affirms her place among America's most promising young poets.
From "Lord's Prayer"
My father taught it the old-fashioned way,
alien and ornate as a wafer on the tongue.
Thine for your, art for are -
new words for words I knew
at three years old.
I don't remember
what I meant when I asked God
to deliver me, to forgive things
I didn't know I'd someday do.
Trespass, Dad explained, was sin:
going where you didn't belong,
off the narrow path of goodness
into the glittery forest.
He made no mention
of the sin not
mortal or venial
but liminal, embedded
in you the way life is,
a simple thing decanted
deep inside the bone.
Erin Hanusa's poems have appeared in the
Southern Review, Quarterly West, and other publications.
She currently resides in Madison, Wisconsin, with her family.
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