“Sara Henning’s Terra Incognita opens with a dream, and the poems undo us the way dreams do, with imagery that is seared into our minds so completely, we can’t shake it. I left this book reluctantly, a little dazed, and wanting to go back inside the world Henning created, “the sky dusk-raw,” the stars “moving braille.” Terra Incognita is a rare book of poems, and Henning is a rare talent.”

—Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change

“The impeccable crafting, formal mastery, and literary intelligence of View from True North all function as a brave counterbalance to the harrowing material at its core. What shores up the valor of this book’s acute witnessing gaze is its language—lush, lustrous, hammered into archetype: ‘Jags of heat-whelmed ice too sultry / not to thieve through the specular reflection / spiral into a raid of light’—its language as quantum physics, zeroing in on tragedy at the atomic level, at the semiotic level, the tyrant’s ashes ‘a collage of signs enticing / the next great signifier.’ Henning’s ravishing music is in revolt against the trauma of the book’s narrative, just as her sonnet sequences provide the ballast of history, of virtuosity. Sara Henning, a ‘trickster,’ ‘an heiress of disaster,’ has composed a radical masterpiece.”

—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

“When the embers of a blaze drift upward over the spindrifts of a churning time, we receive Henning’s language in curlicues of smoke. The poems in Burn meditate on what comes after the ash, pondering how we must have moved forward with our hands extended outward into the miracle of the open air. Her splendid lyrical words return us again and again to the clearing where somehow, despite it all, we are still able to breathe.”

—Oliver de la Paz, author of The Diaspora Sonnets