I do not know whether it is morning or mourning,the name of the doves calling in the hems of daysometimes, I do not know the spelling of a single wordor why the couple gesture in their car making a left turntonight the clouds settle on the mountains: pale pinkand then mist, and then no mountainalmost every day I say to someone: “it is not important”but the wing of it the beak the onyx eyeis that I do not know this either
Invocation
Han VanderHart
Feature Date
- April 13, 2025
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“Invocation” from LARKS: by Han VanderHart.
Published by Ohio University Press on March 11, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 by Han VanderHart.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Han VanderHart is a queer writer living in Durham, North Carolina, under the pines. Their second poetry collection, Larks (Ohio University Press, 2025), was selected by Chanda Feldman as winner of the 2024 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Han is also the author of What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021) and has essays and poetry published in Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, AGNI, and elsewhere. Han hosts Of Poetry Podcast and, alongside Amorak Huey, co-edits the poetry press River River Books.
"Larks heeds the calls of the world—whether that beckoning sounds like bird chatter, orchestral music on the radio, or voices around the dinner table. As the book unfolds, it disrupts the integrity of childhood memory filled with the song and sights of natural wonder, in order to let family silences begin to speak. The present blurs necessitating a reconsideration of the past, mythos, and family. Even as these poems craft moments of lyric and sonic beauty they learn to integrate anger and lament. The soft and patient voice of these poems makes these meditations all the more piercing."
—Chanda Feldman, Hollis Summers Poetry Prize final judge and author of Approaching the Fields
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