Poetry Paper, Perfect Bound. 38 pages
2026, ISBN: 978-1-952781-36-0 $20.95 $16.76 + S&H SPECIAL ADVANCE ORDER PRICE
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With her implicit trust in the poem’s ability to create surprise, award-winning poet and educator Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk takes the plunge into prose poetry in Doom & Beauty, her ninth collection, a chapbook from Mayapple Press. While informed by an awareness of war, cruelty, or lurking woe, Blackhawk ever harkens to Rilke’s epigraph as she creates her vibrant mix of memoir and travelogue, elegy and ekphrasis, loss and discovery in order to name what we cannot grasp. From Walt Whitman to W.S. Merwin, an uncle, brothers, lost friends or a late life love, many characters come to life in settings as far flung as the woods of her Georgia childhood, the Isle of Elba, the Swedish countryside, Toledo’s Maumee River, or the Atlantic shore. Readers will appreciate being pulled along by the rich cadences of Blackhawk’s language as they ride back and forth through the journeys and vicissitudes of her life, loves, and flights of fancy.
What People are Saying…
In Doom & Beauty, Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk transforms memory into living presence. These luminous prose poems move effortlessly across landscapes both intimate and far-flung—through art, history, memory, and the natural world—revealing lives not as artifacts of the past but as fully realized human presences. Each piece bears witness with remarkable intelligence, emotional generosity, and exquisite sensory detail. By the end of this collection, I came away with a deeper understanding not only of the people who inhabit these pages, but of the generous heart behind them. Rarely have I encountered writing so humane, so expansive, and so memorable. – Diane DeCillis, author of When the Heart Needs a Stunt Double
In this slim volume of elegies, we enter the intertwined obligations of the living and the dead. The beauty and the doomed, though I’d argue there is much more of beauty then there is of darkness at the center of these finely rendered prose poems. We meet an uncle from the thirties, a partner who crossed. We are given migrations across a nation. We enter spaces of labor and art in California, Venice, sea side dunes and galleries of paint and grief, and love. We run in Georgia through childhood rooms and woods. We follow a young woman across Europe during Vietnam. Each poem is a life which unfolds as it does it enters into conversation with Whitman, Merwin, Van Gogh, Vachel Lindsey. These are poems exquisitely crafted, as Blackhawk is a cartographer of remembrance and by remembering we go on with her “not wanting to arrive anywhere.” Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Death Prefers the Minor Keys
So Here
…you, by being dead, are more alive to me than ever.
Alan Shapiro
So here I’ve gone and reframed your painting, the one of the street with its tilted telephone poles, the street that led me into sleep so often now bordered by an eggplant purple, very trendy and advised by the decorator to pick up the purples and greens of other pieces in my room, but it limits it now, limits you, it’s as if you are truly framed, captured, gone with and within this frame. I should have chosen a lighter color, a chalky off-white, something to move the eye outward, not this dark lock. I still get lost in that street, the way I got lost in the exhibit of Plains Indian Ledger Art yesterday, brought up short by the bounding buffalo and sun dance memories painted by Bear’s Heart—shorn of his hair, imprisoned in a fort in Florida — and then the blue-clad troops marching his Cheyenne into a stockade, the warriors standing stiff, two-dimensional against the gridded paper, heading into an unthinkable dark. Oh, everywhere is ache and beauty, doom and joy, so it almost wasn’t strange the way your friend came up to me, surprised me in the act of looking and brought you, as always, with him: your Van, a lifetime of friendship and art and you there within it. Your paintings live with me, bring me your voice, your antic laugh, your wry, sly glances up from the surfaces of them. There you are working at your easel in the corner of your studio, its tilted frame in your lap, and there I am, sitting in a chair across the room, lifting my skirt.
About Terry Blackhawk
Dr. Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk is Founding Director (1995-2015) of Detroit’s InsideOut Literary Arts Project, a poets-in-schools program dedicated to encouraging young people to “think broadly, create bravely, and share their voices with the wider world.” Blackhawk began writing poetry in her forties while teaching English at Detroit’s Mumford High School. She has won the 1990 Foley Poetry Award, the 2010 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry from Nimrod International, the 2013 Springfed Arts Poetry Prize, and grants from the Michigan Council for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Kresge Arts in Detroit, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her five full-length poetry collections include body & field (Michigan State University Press, 1999); Escape Artist (BkMk Press) selected by Molly Peacock for the 2002 John Ciardi Prize; The Light Between (Wayne State University Press, 2012); and One Less River (Mayapple Press) named a 2019 Top Indie Poetry Title by Kirkus Reviews. Along with InsideOut Senior Writer Peter Markus, Blackhawk edited To Light a Fire: Twenty Years with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project (Wayne State UP, 2015) which chronicles the growth of the organization from her classroom teaching and features essays by writers-in-residence with the program.
Twice named Michigan Creative Writing Teacher of the Year, Dr. Blackhawk has developed courses in creative writing pedagogy for graduate students at Oakland University and classes on ekphrastic writing held on site at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Her 1992-1993 NEH Teacher Sabbatical Award allowed her to pursue her interest in Emily Dickinson, and she has presented at conferences and published poems and essays about the poet. Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk earned a B.A. in Literature in 1968 from Antioch College which awarded her the 2021 Horace Mann Award given to alumni who have, according to Mann’s injunction to the college’s graduating class in 1859, won “some victory for humanity.” In 1995, she received a PhD in Language Arts Education from Oakland University, which awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2013. After over 50 years as a Detroiter, Bohnhorst Blackhawk moved to Connecticut to be near her son Yale professor Ned Blackhawk and grandchildren. As a New Englander, she participates in programming with Amherst’s Emily Dickinson Museum, the Connecticut Poetry Society, and the Robert Frost Place, where she serves on the Advisory Board.