RiparianPress is excited to announce the publication (August 1, 2022) of Send Word, a new collection of poems by Donna Henderson.
Send Word , Donna Henderson, Riparian Press 2022. 110 pgs. ISBN: 979-8-218-03822-9
advance praise for send word
“Like a whisper, the question what is a life? breathes through Donna Henderson’s new collection. From these occasionally wry, often tender, always sonically lush poems coalesces a definition: a life is not a vessel to be filled, but to be emptied and restored and poured out again, endlessly shuttling energies between receiver and giver. Listening, language, and song are the currents that fill us, energize us, and connect us to others. Listen, this speaker says to us,
to your own, that other loneliness that is our vast capacity. / I thought it longed for filling. // It longs to sing.”
—Karen Holmberg
To be born is to cleave in the double sense of the word (to split from and to cling to): it is that first splitting which generates the urge to return, to bind.
These poems explore varieties of cleaving and their tensions, as the speaker navigates these across a lifetime: tensions between our feral and civil selves, between compliance and transgression, between connection and individuation, between containment and surrender, and between what the worlds of waking and dreaming each ask and offer.
Ultimately, these poems are about language itself as both a means and a way, as language imagines for itself a unity located exactly in the place between.