Terra Incognita

“Sara Henning’s Terra Incognita opens with a dream, and the poems undo us the way dreams do, with imagery that is seared into our minds so completely we can’t shake it. I left this book reluctantly, a little dazed, and wanting to go back inside the world Henning created, ‘the sky dusk-raw,’ the stars ‘moving braille.’ Terra Incognita is a rare book of poems, and Henning is a rare talent.”

“‘Grief turns out to be a place none of us knows until we reach it,’ Joan Didion once declared. Sara Henning crafts beautiful and protean music out of the terra incognita of motherlessness. The gallery of richly evoked lines and incidents suggests the poet is a dynamic, at-the-ready elegist for all she sees. ‘In the belly of every summer day is a god / taking its first breath, so I learn to call it praying, / my mother forsaking the AC for a grace called smoking / in the car.’ Yes, one of the book’s major triumphs is that Henning, with artful precision and a daughter’s utmost love, makes the vital woman who was her first window on the world count for the reader as well.”

“In Sara Henning’s stunning elegies, the mundane sears and sparks, infused with the speaker’s fierce grief. These poems accelerate, their energetic lines and images fueled by Henning’s imaginative precision and a lyricism that pops with its verbs and trills, whether telling a story of a mare’s head thrust into the window of a Chevy Nova, or the loss of a baby, or a mother’s Dilaudid-induced hallucinations of violent abduction while dying of cancer. The poems of Terra Incognita are thrilling with their vibrancy and beauty in the face of loss.”

“In Terra Incognita, Sara Henning gives us a passionate group of elegies for her mother and an equally intense set of odes to her marriage. The territory she explores may be unknown ground, as her title suggests, but the poet knows where she stands. At every turn these poems are totally imaginative, totally alive.”