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EXIT GARDEN STATE

EXIT GARDEN STATE

$21.00Price

ISBN: 979-8-9890965-1-0

Pub Date: Sept. 2024

Pages: 82


By John Hennessy


John Hennessy’s Exit Garden State never strays far from family life as it ranges from childhood in New Jersey’s industrial corridor to mid-life in the woods of New England, from Rahway Prison’s sullen grey dome, Newark’s steel flyway, to Lisbon’s labyrinths and miradouros, from the smooth volcanic peaks of the Cyclades to his dead in Dublin. Keenly mindful of their ancestors and the immigrations that have brought them here, the speakers of these poems, their various personae, explore the knots of familial experience, what it’s like to be both parent and child simultaneously, to be embraced by family as well as to lose it, to celebrate kinship and endure its sorrows and changes. Hennessy remains rooted in the propulsive energy of his lines, the clarity of his craft, while traversing emotional territory as broad as the book’s geography.


    Vulnerable and formally dexterous, this fine collection manages to be haunted by personal history and all of that which we stand to inherit, and yet brimming, somehow, with hope.

    —Nathan McClain, author of Previously Owned


    John Hennessy is the author of two previous collections, Coney Island Pilgrims (Ashland Poetry Press) and Bridge and Tunnel (Turning Point Books), and his poems appear in The Best American Poetry 2024, The Believer, The New Republic, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Yale Review. With Ostap Kin, he is the translator of A New Orthography (also from Lost Horse Press), a collection of poems by Serhiy Zhadan and a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He is a co-winner of the Derek Walcott Prize, for the translated anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature) and Set Change, selected poems by Yuri Andrukhovych (NYRB/Poets Series). Hennessy is the poetry editor of The Common and teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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