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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In Doom & Beauty, her tenth poetry collection, award-winning poet and educator Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk takes the plunge into prose poetry. A vibrant mix of travelogue, elegy, and ekphrasis, the collection roams from the woods of her Georgia childhood to the Isle of Elba, Toledo’s Maumee River, or New York’s Lower East Side and brings to life along the way characters as varied as poets Whitman and Lindsay, family members, lost friends, or a late life love. Readers will appreciate being pulled along by Blackhawk’s rich cadences 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 the author of four chapbooks and five full-length poetry collections, including Escape Artist, winner of the 2002 John Ciardi Prize and One Less River, a Kirkus Reviews “Top 2019 Indie Poetry Title.” Her awards include a Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellowship, the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Michigan Council for the Arts. She received the 2021 Antioch College Horace Mann Alumni Award for “victories for humanity” and is featured among notable Detroit poets and publishers in the 2015 Art in Woodbridge public mural
Twice named Michigan Creative Writing Teacher of the year, Blackhawk moved to Connecticut in 2016 after twenty years as Founding Executive Director of Detroit’s InsideOut Literary Arts Project. She now lives close to her son, Yale historian Ned Blackhawk, and grandchildren and is active with the Connecticut Poetry Society and the Robert Frost Place. Her Poets & Writers page is here