Hawk Parable
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Hawk Parable begins with a family mystery and engages with the limits of historical knowledge—particularly of the atomic bombs the US dropped at the end of the Second World War and the repercussions of atomic tests the US conducted throughout the twentieth century. These poems explore a space between environmental crisis and a crisis of conscience. As a lyric collection, Hawk Parable begins as a meditation on the author's grandfather's possible involvement in the Nagasaki mission and moves through poems that engage with the legacy of nuclear testing on our global environment. At times, Hawk Parable borrows language from declassified nuclear test films, survivor accounts of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, scientific studies of bird migrations through the Nevada Test Site, and the author's grandfather's letters. This book enacts what it means to encounter fragments—of historical records, family stories, and survivor accounts—through exploring a variety of forms. Hawk Parable seeks what it means to be human in the spaces between tragedy and beauty, loss and life, in the relationships between the lyric speaker, history, and personal memory.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Faulkner argued that under the sway of a "universal and physical fear," writers had forgotten how to attend to "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself." In her second book, Mills (Tongue Lyre) proves that Faulkner underestimated a poet's ability to manage enormous shifts of scale. Questions probe and pierce: "Can I call it light/ knowing what came?" Mills unlooses documentary evidence of bomb testing, deployment, and devastation that intersect with moments of acute self-reckoning: "So I kissed a goat on the mouth. I was warned./ I looked too fast into its eyes, both/ black stitches." Haunted by the unverified possibility of her fighter-pilot grandfather's "involvement in the Nagasaki mission," Mills scans skies for contrails, scrutinizes negatives, reads survivors' accounts, and sifts through white sands: "I swallow vomit after watching// the island wart into an orange bulb," but "Gone is the oyster-/ white rocket. You can't/ take it back." The poet asks: "Did the garble/ protect this body from history?" Her answer: "The land buries the thing we made to live/ just beyond the imagination." Here, Mills has written a book for the long nuclear century.
