The How Her Spirit Got Out presale is over! If you’d like to order a copy, you can still do so at any time via the main HHSGO page.
Everything that follows is just a reminder of the fun we had.
PRESALE INCENTIVES
THE READER – $10 1 copy of How Her Spirit Got Out (HHSGO), at the discounted presale price with free shipping!
THE JOURNAL – $20 1 copy of HHSGO + apt 4 (includes two poems by Krysten!)
THE POET – $26 1 copy of HHSGO, 1 copy of Michael Lynch’s Underlife and Portico, 1 copy of Gillian Devereux’s They Used to Dance on Saturday Nights
THE COLLECTOR – $40 4 copies of HHSGO, each with a different color cover:
BROADSIDE ASSISTANCE – $75 1 copy of HHSGO, plus limited edition broadside
KRYSTEN HILL FAN CLUB – $100 1 copy of HHSGO, plus a personal reading (in-person if in Boston; Skype if long-distance)
THE PHILANTHROPIST – $110 1 copy of HHSGO, plus $100 donation to The Massachusetts Literary Education and Performance Collective (MASSLeap)
ORIGINAL POEM – $250 1 copy of HHSGO, plus Krysten will write a poem specifically for you
LITERARY TOUR – $10,000 (limited to 1) 1 copy of HHSGO, plus travel with Krysten to visit landmarks related to every female poet mentioned in the collection: Sylvia Plath’s birthplace (Boston, MA); Audre Lorde’s archive (Atlanta, GA); and the Zora Neale Hurston House (Fort Pierce, FL).
Krysten Hill’s How Her Spirit Got Out is a lively, urgent song. Answering the writers whose voices raised her, Hill calls on Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, and Zora Neale Hurston to help her navigate the complicated landscape of selfhood. Hill’s speaker, wise and direct, open yet elusive, also sings for the women who brought her up: her aunt, her grandmother, and her mother. These spirits who’ve guided her life and taught her through example how black women persevere, have given her the means to bear witness to an age of racial violence. With intensity, audacity, and a darkly comic wit, Hill grapples with the question of how to fight “a city that knows you’re unarmed,” rendering each poem as a weapon and a shield, and using both for self-defense.
“Krysten Hill’s necessary and powerful first collection, How Her Spirit Got Out, is crowded with our family: a father who piles ‘too much food onto my plate,’ ‘black women who go missing,’ ‘a braided clan of women / who held their tongues with their teeth,’ a mama with ‘a voice/that could reach / like an arm and snatch you / from any room of the house.’ These poems are good company, reunion; they laugh with us at our ‘pretty-ugly boys / with dirty fingernails, who never kept / jobs and gave me yeast infections,’ the girlfriend who’s scary until it ‘turns out she’s all talk. So / are you,’ the bad teacher who asks ‘Is there any way / you can write this poem/from his perspective?’ No. There isn’t. Or at least there shouldn’t be. These poems report what it’s too bad we need to know; the horror-show results from googling ‘How to Tame a Wild Woman,’ matter-of-fact tidbits like ‘It’s Not Uncommon for Police to Overestimate the Age and Size of Black Boys,’ places ‘where the trees grew shorter and thick / like a bundle of wrists held together, where the cicadas / screamed louder than she did’ that ache with what they don’t need to say out loud. These poems are a middle finger tucked in the hip pocket of your favorite dress, Audre Lorde’s ‘throwing knife / to hide in your hair,’ grandmother’s ‘rifle mounted on the wall / for the coyotes howling for her chickens at night.'”
— Jill McDonough, author of Habeas Corpus and Where You Live
“Krysten Hill’s poems grab you by the throat and pull you into dark rooms and dark selves. The poems know that ‘the world is full of weapons’ and poisonous legacies that pursue and haunt us–and become knives themselves, daring to carve deep silence into sound and image, into resurrection. These poems exude at once vulnerability, rawness, and lucid beauty.”
— Danielle Legros Georges, author of The Dear Remote Nearness of You,
Poet Laureate, City of Boston
Krysten Hill is an educator, writer, and performer who has showcased her poetry on stage at The Massachusetts Poetry Festival, Blacksmith House, Cantab Lounge, Merrimack College, U35 Reading Series, and many others. She received her MFA in poetry from UMass Boston where she currently teaches. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Word Riot, The Baltimore Review, B O D Y, Muzzle, PANK, Winter Tangerine Review, apt, Amethyst Arsenic, Damfino, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award.
I just read an excerpt of HHSGO and can’t wait for the book to come out. I have been a fan of Ms Hill’s urban flair of writing and this chapbook does not disappoint. I see the maturity of her works in how she writes of the familiar and leaves you in complete identity with the character.