Half-Hazard
Poems
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Half-Hazard is the Winner of the Emily Dickinson First Book Award from the Poetry Foundation for a debut by an American poet over forty.
Half-Hazard is a book of near misses, would-be tragedies, and luck. As Kristen Tracy writes in the title poem, “Dangers here. Perils there. It’ll go how it goes.” The collection follows her wide curiosity, from growing up in a small Mormon farming community to her exodus into the forbidden world, where she finds snakes, car accidents, adulterers, meteors, and death-marked mice. These wry, observant narratives are accompanied by a ringing lyricism, and Tracy’s knack for noticing what’s so funny about trouble and her natural impulse to want to put all the broken things back together. Full of wrong turns, false loves, quashed beliefs, and a menagerie of animals, Half-Hazard introduces a vibrant new voice in American poetry, one of resilience, faith, and joy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tracy, a prolific author of tween and teen fiction, debuts in verse with an irresistible collection selected for the Poetry Foundation's Emily Dickinson First Book Award. These energetic poems showcase a writer who knows how to draw readers in with short sentences, quick turns, and a comic edge that courts disaster. Tracy opens with an escape from a religious upbringing: "I fell from a Bible. A half-blonde tease./ With a good good start, I struck out/ God-filled and thrilled." She recounts spotting a former coworker having sex in the cooler, admitting that "Tight-assed and aging. Beholden// only to her own climb and joy. It took me years/ to admire exactly what she'd done." Animals are ever-present across a variety of settings (zoo, circus, yard, canyon) and in visceral encounters that would rewrite the scripts of captivity and danger. For example, the tiger at the magic show "could lead a completely different life if it stopped/ being so good at performing." The title poem, a wacky villanelle about the putting a girl on the moon, amusingly presumes she would be safer there than on Earth: "Does a girl who lacks parties turn blue in pitch black?/ Dangers here. Perils there. It'll go how it goes." Readers should feel refreshed by Tracy's enjoyable turn to the lyric.
