You can trust Vermont poet Carlene Kucharczyk to take you on an extraordinary and nostalgic journey in her debut poetry collection, Strange Hymn. “The story moved forward / with birches, boats, handsome men, but always / a shadow somewhere lurking, seeping in / through the damp walls, circling the blue / mountains,” she writes. Through lush descriptions and exciting language, Kucharczyk’s poems create worlds of their own.
Strange Hymn won the 2024 Juniper Prize for Poetry. Published by the University of Massachusetts Press, the books in this prize series are some of my favorites.
“What will we do with the hour before the wolf comes?” Kucharczyk asks, in a poem called “The Language of Fairytales.” The poem doesn’t answer the question directly, but proposes many answers, in disconnected phrases like “Elk float freely by the bank,” and “Seething sister bites into you.”
Her questions always seem to lead to more questions because hers is not a poetics of certainty but of dreamy associations and sonic logics. In another poem, she asks: “What is it then / that would not shine for me?”
Kucharczyk asks the reader to consider the Virgin Mary through many different frames and readings. She gives us moments of seriousness and moments of play. My favorite is this one, playing on the letters in the name Mary: “An army. An arm. A yam. A ram. A ray. Ma. Amy. May. Am.”
Kucharczyk’s voice is at once careful and wild: “I was a wish / swimming in a river” she writes. “The self winks at me in the mirror. She calls to me from behind / the glass. I think she’s inviting us in.” This is a gorgeous debut poetry collection, full of invitations to explore fairy tales, religion and the workings of language itself.
Rena J. Mosteirin wrote Experiment 116 (Counterpath press, 2021), Half-Fabulous Whales (Little Dipper, 2019) and Nick Trail’s Thumb (Kore Press, 2008). She is the co-author of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019) an academic and poetic exploration of the Apollo 11 guidance computer code. Mosteirin is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine, teaches creative writing workshops at Dartmouth College and owns Left Bank Books, a used bookstore in Hanover.