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by Elizabeth Hazen (Author)
The Sky Will Hold is a meditation on life: life inside a second marriage, life in middle age, life as a stepparent. It's a close look at desire and addiction, at love and loss, at learning how to let go while still holding on to what is necessary. Elizabeth Hazen doesn't back away from sticky topics, we see the inner workings of blended families, parenting a nearly-grown child, and living in an aging body with all the freedoms and pitfalls it can bring. This collection is a mantra of survival and love and continuing to move forward and always, always, believing the sky will hold, even when all signs point to the opposite.
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Elizabeth Hazen's new book is full of wise musings on being in the middle of things. Not least middle age: in the clever "Real Estate for the Blended Family (Or What I Learned from Zillow)" she considers a real-estate ad for a light-filled house with "square/footage enough to hold all our misgivings." Hazen's sensibility has the square footage to hold moments of anxiety and hope, often within the same poem. As she says, "I've tried to learn to want things/ as they are." She has a keen eye-lipsticks in a drawer are "little tubes like shotgun shells"-and a fresh sense of humor: "Yesterday a groundhog waddled across/the yard while I tried to understand/ What to wear now that I'm not young." This is a poet who helps us live with ambiguity, and with the "thickening green/ of passing time."Mary Jo Salter, author of The Surveyors
Elizabeth Hazen's third collection astutely surveys the embers that have gone quiet, fires burning within, and what a person considers setting newly ablaze. "For years I waited for a sign-directive/or disaster-to dictate what came next, but time//is patient, has nowhere to be," says the speaker of "Woman at Forty-five." Compassionate and wry, the personal narratives of The Sky Will Hold also turn their attention to formal pleasures: expansive gloses, an unforgettable sestina, and a masterclass in shaping stanzas. This book is a powerful, quietly startling interrogation of the midlife landscape.Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode: Poems
Into a world of "edge and threat," Elizabeth Hazen's The Sky Will Hold delivers redeeming loveliness. Grateful attention to life's small magics, such as a pebble offered by a crow and a lover combing his fingers through a horse's mane, suffuse the collection. Love poems in a range of forms-for spouse, children, a dying father-manifest kindness and beauty. Love of self comes hardest, given the masks women feel pressure to wear. Hazen's poetry, however, "makes teeth" instead of falsely smiling, integrating a welter of feelings into a whole more true than sweet, because it is also lovely to claim ourselves "without apology."Lesley Wheeler, author of Mycocosmic
Elizabeth Hazen's The Sky Will Hold sees straight through to the bone-whether navigating blended family dynamics, middle-age awakenings, or the tender, fraught terrain of mothering a nearly-grown son. Hazen's lines are taut as a held breath, each word carrying weight without excess, each image landing with startling accuracy. Here is a poet who knows how to look-at landscapes, at marriages, at the self-and who trusts her readers enough to show us exactly what she sees. The Sky Will Hold solidifies Hazen as a poet of remarkable formal control and emotional courage, capable of holding contradiction and complexity in perfect, devastating balance. Charlotte Pence, author of Code and Many Small Fires
