The Clearing

A new collection from poet Lisa Hiton.

Arriving to the pastoral happens repeatedly and full of worry in THE CLEARING. For the pastoral stands for the fields of the Holocaust, of the imagination, of the Midwest, of the body, and even the empty field of the blank page. In the absence of knowing how to properly bury our inheritances of the 20th century, Hiton turns to fictive spectacle--to narrative invention, sensory desires, and malleable landscapes--as a last gesture toward hope. As the intellectual ambitions and fears ramp up, the urgency of the body (and the refusal to look at it) does too.

Erotic and liturgical, the poems in Lisa Hiton's chapbook The Clearing summon a Jewish North Shore of Chicago that shifts under iterative, imagined futures and pasts. Here, we continually mourn the speaker's living father, who dies in several different Jewish histories; we reach past simple desire all the way inside the speaker's lover to 'turn [her] heart over.' Hiton's evoked intimacies in The Clearing are precarious, dangerous, and heartbreakingly beautiful; in this, they match the world's. In this dazzling chapbook (and all of Hiton's oeuvre), I remain grateful for the poet's commitment to capturing the ongoing instability of our safety--as Jews, as queer women, as daughters--alongside the blessed, profound joys of Jewish queer womanhood.--Rachel Mennies

Lisa Hiton's poems bring me in close, then hurt me. To heal, to recover, to touch truths that have been denied, she reimagines a family's history. 'Obsessed with death, but having no desire to die, ' her speaker pushes herself to see a super bloom out of ash filled ground. This sequence moves through tundra, heat, grief, and the surreal. It celebrates love, across painful expanses, that she will not let go. It's a celebratory, queer collection. I am grateful for the way mourning rituals, in Hiton's voice, become chants of persistence.--Dan Kraines

Poetry.