Cover Art by G.J. Hagopian
Handfast by Katherine Hagopian Berry
About Handfast…….
What is love anyway /but the putting of your hand in mine/the never letting go?
Fireflies and ravens, woodfrogs and eels, mothers and children, ancestors and inheritors, Arizona and Maine, Handfast celebrates the infinite richness of communion. Poems face each other across the page: one a little more sinister, one a little more dexterous, celebrating all the different ways we can cherish both each other and our fragile world.
<—— $19.99 USD or 14.99 British Pounds
Praise for Handfast:
Kate Hagopian Berry's Handfast extends the poet's meditations in book form on the tactile shadings of being caught in human loves, needs, and desires, in our increasingly disastrous present. Ingeniously structured as Sinister, Dextra, and Cardioids (left, right, and heart lines), along the palms of pages these poems gather a human family within nature's vast hold, contending with concepts of sharing, togetherness and apartness at the cosmological and personal level. Indeed the sparking of cosmological as personal is the book's sharp reveal. There is such an undertow of longing in these poems, and such tenderness "like the cheek of your daughter/ so beautiful your heart has no new words." And yet Hagopian Berry finds her words through questioning, searching, asking "Where is the version where all of us survive?" These deeply maternal and intellectually acute poems hold the reader fast through "the stories of our scars." A worthy and substantial read, Handfast carries forward NatureCulture's goal of aligning the human and the natural, knowing that the human world is not actually different from the natural world, it only images itself to be. — Claire Millikin, author of Nightlight