Marick Press | The Dropped Hand, Terry Blackhawk

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THE DROPPED HAND

Terry Blackhawk

Paperback - April 2007
84 Pages
ISBN: 978-0-9779703-3-9
USD $14.95 + Shipping

About the Author, Terry Blackhawk

Terry Blackhawk’s poetry collections include Trio: Voices from the Myths (Ridgeway Press); Body & Field, (MSU Press); Escape Artist (BkMk Press), winner of the 2002 John Ciardi Prize; and a Greatest Hits chapbook from Pudding House Press. Blackhawk’s poems have appeared in many journals with reviews of her books in Calyx, Poet Lore, Booklist, ForeWord and American Book Review. In 1990 she was named Michigan’s Creative Writing Teacher of the Year. In 1992-1993 she received a National Endowment for the Humanities sabbatical award to study Emily Dickinson and later published several articles in An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia (Greenwood Press). In 1995, while still teaching for Detroit Public Schools, she founded InsideOut Literary Arts Project, a writers in schools organization. She has received the Foley Poetry Prize, an artist-in-residence grant from Michigan Council for the Arts, the Michigan Governor’s Award for Arts Education, a Detroit Metro Times Progressive Hero Award and the United Black Artists Pioneering Teacher in the Arts Award. Terry Blackhawk is a graduate of Antioch College. She holds a Ph.D. in Reading and Language Arts Education from Oakland University and is a founding board member of WITSA, the national Writers in the Schools Alliance.

Reviews

To rescue language from itself: this is one of the primary responsibilities of the poet. Terry Blackhawk takes this aim and takes it to the highest of levels by shaping and reshaping language into a poetry that is built to last. In The Dropped Hand, Blackhawk's third full-length book, what is lost is regained, is reclaimed, is remade, into a world that must be, at times cruelly and with great difficulty, relearned. This book is one poet's daring testimony that dares to go to that most inward of places where few books dare to go. It is from such a place, of absence and silence, of "sorrow loosened/ at last," that Blackhawk "pulls songs from the lining of her pockets," from the socket of her heart, "And sings them for you.

Death gains on us. It honors neither time nor place nor human quest for meaning. Its emblem might be, as it is in these fine elegies, a dropped hand of playing cards: ‘abrupt and final / silence.’ If that were all, the bravery of the poet would be much, but Terry Blackhawk wrests from this strict vista a powerful antithesis. With patience and wisdom and, above all, with love, she crafts the vessel that counters dissolution. It is poetry’s dream to do just this. - Linda Gregerson

In The Dropped Hand, Terry Blackhawk masterfully weaves threads of loss and grief into a fine tapestry that is both personal and universal.This is, I think, Dr. Blackhawk’s finest and most moving collection. - Naomi Long Madgett

I love the poetry of Terry Blackhawk, above all else, for its heart, always searching for “something bursting with spring and belief.” Through the poems in The Dropped Hand she teaches us both how to hold on and how to let go of those we love. These compassionate poems reach out through the complex world to find the connections that sustain us. She celebrates our exposed places, the places where we are most vulnerable and most human. We so often cover up those places — it takes a magician like Terry Blackhawk to reveal to us what was there all along. - Jim Daniels

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