.png){kind=small}
Ken Hada
Our partnership, born in silence, /springing slowly in what/we share – old dreams/ to turn death into green – /the slumber washing away/through teary eyes blinking. The poems, meditations and lamentations in Ken Hada’s Visions for the Night see several disparate things: nature as both metaphor and vehicle for human fragility; mortals’ tenuous relations with the environment, and the somber reverence that we are merely creatures among many; fading relationships with self and others like withering leaves in frost. Hada, with stolid grace, sings that our actions lead to our demise, yet finds dim solace in the possibilities: wildlife, memory, and a return to the gritty routine of my tomorrows. Hada asks When Time comes calling/will my crawling toward faith/be enough? Some of the answers lurk in this stirring collection.
--Quraysh Ali Lansana, author of Killing the Negative: A Conversation in Art & Verse and the skin of dreams: new and collected poems, 1995-2018
Click here to order a copy directly from the author.
.png)
.jpeg)
Nominated for the
2024 Griffin Poetry Prize
_______
Finalist
2023 Oklahoma Book Award in Poetry
Come Before Winter is a polite invitation written with a keen and pressing awareness of time passing, measured and marked by the turning of seasons. Like the pastoral letter from Paul to Timothy, from which the title is derived, these poems arrive as exhortations to the reader to meditate, as Emerson says, on “the flux of all things.”
“Ken Hada’s poems in Come Before Winter are exhilarating: richly textured, humming with energy, and deeply felt. Hada finds depths where no one else bothers to look. I read this book twice and I’m just getting started with it.”
--Lou Berney
Read a review of Come Before Winter in World Literature Today.
Click here to order a copy directly from the author.
.png)
Contour Feathers
poems by Ken Hada
