View from True North
Southern Illinois University Press
In these edgy poems of witness, Sara Henning’s speaker serves as both conduit and curator of the destructive legacies of alcoholism and multigenerational closeting. Considering the impact of addiction and sexual repression in the family and on its individual members, Henning explores with deft compassion the psychological ramifications of traumas across multiple generations.
A Sweeter Water
Lavender Ink
Lyric surface collides with both dreamscape and haunted reality in a metanarrative of longing.
Garden Effigies
Dancing Girl Press
“I’m an alibi / for salvage,” Sara Henning proclaims in Garden Effigies. The creatures – human and otherwise – who inhabit these poems are “singed by intimacy” and “stunned by entanglement /or paradox.” Thispoet’s alibis are not denials of presence or involvement, but explorations of how the stories we salvage can be transformed into songs, murmurations, “the most usable truth(s).”
—Grace Bauer, author of Nowhere All At Once
To Speak of Dahlias
Finishing Line Press
“Beneath the lush and elaborate lyric surfaces of Sara Henning’s poems one finds edgy and haunted narratives. The poems radiate with the uncanny, the dis-ease of a troubling dream, of déjà vu, of clairvoyance. The familiar here is strange, the strange familiar.”
–Eric Pankey