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One Less River

One Less River, Mayapple Press, 2019

In One Less River, Terry Blackhawk follows Hafiz’s injunction to ‘Greet yourself/In your thousand other forms/As you mount the hidden tide and travel/Home.’ Hafiz, through this epigraph, serves her well. The book journeys through loves and losses, elegies for friends and poets, and walks for a while alongside Protea, a mythical female persona—before arriving at various explorations of ars poetica. In the search for home, the poems also take on a variety of poetic forms—shape-shifting, crossing boundaries, inhabiting myriad beings. While steeped in nature, the poems nod to city skylines and are never far from an awareness of inhumanity’s toll. One Less River covers a lot of ground and deepens on second and third readings. Set on beaches, shores, or along the Detroit River and on the city’s beloved Belle Isle, the poems follow the author’s “hidden tide” to Venice, Provincetown, Costa Rica, and elsewhere. One door opens the manuscript; another ends it. While borrowing throughout from Whitman, the door in the final line of the collection leads back to Dickinson whose room, with its light and simplicity, invites us in.

With Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as companion compass points, Terry Blackhawk crosses again and again that boundary between self and the world in sharp, angular sensual lyrics that spread as she writes in one poem like “haloes upward in luminous / turquoise rings.” What she finds in One Less River is kinship with all manner of creatures and alternate selves connected to water. In one poem, an array of thriving arthropods; later, a dying Ivory Gull under a bridge over the Flint River. And friends—a wary friend, friend gone missing, friend who has crossed over. In this elastic world Blackhawk seeks and dissolves like the wafer in one poem until she finds that infinite space Dickinson called “noon.” A palindrome. Infinity on its side. A place of no shadows except those cast by these richly imagined poems. —Dennis Hinrichsen

Rivers run through Terry Blackhawk’s new collection: the Detroit River with its extinct fresh water mussels, their lovely, evocative names juxtaposed against what remains— “the rusted manhole cover and the chipping paint;” the Tallahatchie, which inspires a tender, moving reference to the memory of Emmett Till. In “Nauset,” as if following the course of a river, a woman returns to the sea to build a shelter among the dunes, living alone with the elements until she hears the waves “sing to her” and is restored. Deep under the currents of One Less River is an unspecified story of loss and recovery, of grief and the many meandering paths away from grief. This is a luminous and rewarding book. —Patricia Hooper

Here come Terry Blackhawk’s wonderful poems, naming things with tender precision, imagination, humor, and an astute suspicion of what lies behind the come-on (erotic or evangelical). As the poems walk along the water, the sea, the river, the strait, with Whitman and Dickinson and all the creatures of the water and the air for company—not ignoring the children sickened by some of those waters—Blackhawk is a pilgrim continually seeking some cloister, “an opening to duck into,” a shack in the dunes, a shell emptied of some other, the body with its eyes closed in death, where the mind and heart might rest in love. To paraphrase Elizabeth Bishop, this book penetrates into a depth of knowledge that is dark, salt, clear, moving, and utterly free. —Patrick Donnelly, author of Little-Known OperasNocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, and The Charge.


The Whisk & Whir of Wings  

The Whisk & Whir of Wings, The Ridgeway Press, 2016

An avid birder as well as an accomplished poet, Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellow Terry Blackhawk has selected favorite “bird poems” from her four previous volumes and collected them in The Whisk & Whir of Wings. Grounded in hours of observation, work as an Audubon volunteer, and encounter with the natural world, the poems explore boundaries between the ecological and the psychological. As they travel from backyard to mountainsides, they invite the reader to join in pursuit of the hidden, the wild, the edge of language, what is beyond the frame.

There’s a thing birds do.  An unrehearsed avian collective’s lift and simultaneous midair maneuvers that sweep and flow like a movie sound track, or waft like a feather scarf on wind billows.  It is joyful and marvelous to behold, as are Terry Blackhawk’s bird poems in the Whisk & Whir of Wings.Bill Harris

Ecstatic or meditative, watchful or wry, Terry Blackhawk’s poems invite us to join in pursuit of the hidden, the wild, the edge of language—what is beyond the frame.
The “whisk and whir” of these poems’ memorable music take us to swamp and woodland, beach and river, Ecuador, Detroit, Key West, into the heart of loss, memory, and love—wherever wing beats “exalt” or “disturb” our air. —Judy Rowe Michaels


To Light a Fire: 20 Years with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project

To Light a Fire, Wayne State University Press, 2015

The InsideOut Literary Arts Project (iO) began in 1995 in five Detroit high schools, with weekly classroom visits by a writer-in-residence, the publication of a literary journal for each school, and the mission of encouraging students to use poetry to “think broadly, create bravely, and share their voices with the wider world.” Twenty years later, the program serves some five thousand K–12 students per year, has received national exposure and accolades (including a recent visit to the White House), and has seen numerous student writers recognized for their creativity and performance. In To Light a Fire: 20 Years with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project, founding director Terry Blackhawk and senior writer Peter Markus collect the experiences of writers who have participated in InsideOut over the years to give readers an inside look at the urban classroom and the creative spark of Detroit’s students.

These truthful, celebratory, inspiring essays show us how the writers and teachers of InsideOut have been creating sparks and lighting fires for young people in Detroit for two decades. The pieces, like the kids themselves, have grit, spirit, resilience, the breath of life. —Edward Hirsch

Terry Blackhawk’s discovery of how art matters can’t help but excite and inspire. Stories she shares of her experimental, ever-evolving InsideOut project remind us how and why a wrong-headed attitude toward the arts can sink a whole nation’s boat. Through the poetry, storytelling, playwriting, and performances that she and other caring, recognized Detroit artists practice and profess, Blackhawk’s high school and other institutional students broke past barriers that border the heart. In Jack London’s enduring short story “To Build a Fire,” the narrator says, ‘He worked slowly and carefully, keenly aware of his danger.’ To Light a Fire reignites that very same spark and flame. How much longer can we go on killing off, torturing, or warehousing our pitifully needed long-distance runners? Terry Blackhawk knows. This powerful anthology delivers. —Al Young


The Light Between  

The Light Between, Wayne State University Press, 2012

Terry Blackhawk’s new collection, The Light Between, is an elegant meditation on loss and, in the aftermath of what is lost–relationships, certain sounds, an other, younger self–that which is gained. The intricate progression of these poems reveals the poet at work remembering and forgetting, then forging the thrilling slippages and figurative language that can make the mind leap to a new apprehension of things. Haunted by what can’t be replaced–like lost sounds/trying to make themselves heard—The Light Between is a graceful articulation of the persistence of language to give back to us a knowing reflection of ourselves. —Natasha Trethewey
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The Dropped Hand  

The Dropped Hand, Lotus Press, 2012

In The Dropped Hand, Terry Blackhawk masterfully weaves threads of loss and grief into a fine tapestry that is both personal and universal.This is, I think, Dr. Blackhawk’s finest and most moving collection. —Naomi Long Madgett

I love the poetry of Terry Blackhawk, above all else, for its heart, always searching for “something bursting with spring and belief.” Through the poems in The Dropped Handshe teaches us both how to hold on and how to let go of those we love. These compassionate poems reach out through the complex world to find the connections that sustain us. She celebrates our exposed places, the places where we are most vulnerable and most human. We so often cover up those places — it takes a magician like Terry Blackhawk to reveal to us what was there all along. —Jim Daniels


Escape Artist 

Escape Artist, BKMK Press, 2003

Winner – 2002 the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry

“Terry Blackhawk’s poems, crisp as the first apples of autumn, are tart, knowing, and full of the growth of summer. Poems like these can sustain you.” —Molly Peacock

“A mortal pressure, a dream of escape–Terry Blackhawk is writing for her life in her fine new book of departures and returns, flights and transformations”. —Edward Hirsch

 

 


Body & Field

Body & Field, Michigan State University Press, 1999

“Poem after poem in her aptly titled Body & Field, Terry Blackhawk authenticates her immediate and richly imagined world with sensuous language and an intelligence that probes as often as it discerns. These are poems of a large spirit. I love the sensibility behind them, the eros in them, and the precision of their execution.”—Stephen Dunn

Terry Blackhawk’s exquisite first book of poems is one of the reasons why poetry remains an important literary force in a world where so much language is reduced to sound bites, voice overs and the collapsed linguistic short-hand of ad copy. . . . It is her astonishing diversity of subject and brilliance of metaphor that sets this first book of poems apart. — Anne-Marie Oomen