Testament: Poems (The TRP Chapbook Series)
Description
Testament bears witness to traumas—cultural, personal, and spiritual—as well as moments of revelatory transport. While the catalyzing tragedies and dilemmas are never out of mind, these nuanced poems maintain faith in the act of speaking as a pathway through despair and toward transformation.
The TRP Chapbook Series
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From “Perspective”
And where does your desire for immortality fit in a cosmos predicated on loss?
(Gain, too—but not for you.)
Better to commit yourself to decay, try to find beauty in it. And if you can’t,
it may at least seem beautiful to another, far away.
Praise for Testament: Poems (The TRP Chapbook Series)
“…these nuanced poems maintain faith in the act of speaking as a pathway through despair and toward transformation.”
—NewPages
— NewPages
“Testament shows Luke Hankins deftly at work in a ‘small glory’ of a chapbook! Whether addressing the troubled country that is America or bringing the reader into the prayer-like intimacy of resonant daily moments, Hankins’s poems here create spaces of presence and awareness that are refreshing and which reward rereading. Testament evokes its title by speaking the facts of the self in such ways that we can join Hankins in loving ‘the broken world better / that has broken me.’”
–José Angel Araguz, author of Rotura (Black Lawrence Press)
— José Angel Araguz
"In this incantatory collection, Luke Hankins has both feet firmly planted in the fear and sorrow of the world while simultaneously reaching for transcendence. 'Incense of breakage, / music of demise. // Here is my cathedral,' he writes, insisting that the broken world be a haven for and reflection of the splintered self, holding up what he finds there as mirror in which to take our own measure. There is the fleeting sweetness of a father blowing on his son’s face to cool it, the struggle for moments of glory within a life bounded by strict internal limits, the perseverance of caring for a friend who struggles to care for themself. Yet there is also the thrilling defiance of a poet who sidles up to darkness and demands, 'I hear you are a gateway. // Prove it.' In Testament, Hankins teaches how we might make of our difficulties a portal to some better place."
—Jessica Jacobs, author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books)
— Jessica Jacobs
"The common ingredient in many of [Hankins's] poems seems to be empathy. But in order to have empathy, there's humility."
—Poet to Poet
— Rhada Marcum
"Thank you, Luke Hankins, for writing haunting poems that are approachable, funny, and sticky. [...] [H]e's profound, and quietly so. [...] If only all poets could testify so clearly."
—Tina Kelley, Presence
— Tina Kelley
