
Praise

PRAISE FOR FATHER ELEGIES
“Haunted by an iridescence of memory, personal, yet also universal, these poems constitute the deepest tribute possible—to a father, yes, but also to an entire life and a way of life that had to be abandoned. Stella Hayes’ wonderfully sculpted pieces, formally and adventurously diverse, remind us that we must all, sooner or later, leave the things we love—and they give us a tool for addressing that loss. It’s a beautiful gift and a solace to the heart.” -— Cole Swensen, author of Landscapes on a Train
“How can we begin to grapple with the pain of the past? In Father Elegies, Stella Hayes excavates the landscape of childhood and grief with astonishing power. She moves across languages and forms like a true artist and uses her dexterity with both to capture intimate portraits of loved ones from the past: a mother who “[w]ash[es] grief out / Of hair,” a father who is “breaking up a fistfight or a universe.” A stunning poetry collection that will leave you illuminated long after you put it down.” — Wendy Chen, author of Their Divine Fires
Stela Hayes’s Father Elegies proves simultaneously heartbreaking and resplendent. I can’t think of another collection that so movingly recreates the lost worlds of parental love, culture and language, and time itself. Even as this poet mourns her father and the Ukraine of her childhood, she conjures lasting splendor and vivacity. Contemporary poetry is richer for poems such as “Drunken Night for Two Voices,” “Ars Poetica” and “Home,” and for this whole superb collection. —Peter Campion, author of One Summer Evening at the Falls
Father Elegies by Stella Fridman Hayes is unforgettable. Poems that disassemble and reassemble us with their history, trajectory, and resilience. Poems that move and stand still simultaneously like the breath of languages, stories, and selves the poet has sculpted. This is a fiercely passionate and aesthetically expansive collection by a daring poet. —Nathalie Handal, author of Life in a Country Album
Like Hamlet speaking to the ghost of his father, Stella Hayes presents language as both obstacle and bridge, and these heartbreaking poems remind us that the “simplicity of death /is always surprising.” Despite the tragedies that shape Father Elegies, a farewell song to a larger-than-life father, or perhaps because of them, Hayes’s voice rings clear, her images astonish, her palpable language and inborn music pull us through from start to end. This book will change your life. —Jennifer Militello, New Hampshire Poet Laureate
"It is amazing and, sometimes, miraculous that the wounds of memory can be healed by memory. And yet such a miracle is the eternal task of language: to be both a temporal wound and an enduring cicatrix. In these Father Elegies, Stella Hayes outspeeds death upon the jagged surfaces of history and of syllables. Her task is beautifully accomplished." — Donald Revell, author of The English Boat
“Proving that grief never leaves us but is only transformed, Stella Hayes transforms it into lyricism. This book is one long elegy— for the father, for childhood, for Ukraine. The care and detail with which she returns to scenes with her father are heartbreaking, and in uncovering and dealing with childhood trauma the poems are brave and lit with a harsh and cleansing light.”
— Matthew Rohrer, author of Army of Giants
“With echoes of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and the lyric intensity of Anna Akhmatova, Father Elegies directs us to the hope of restoration through dashes of beauty like a field which is “a light held back from light.” This ambitious and daring volume is not for the faint of heart.” — Karen An-hwei Lee, author of The Maze of Transparencies
"What sets Father Elegies apart is the music of two languages—Russian intertwining English—that together find a rhythm like the ventricular lub and the atrial dub which comprise the heartbeat. The heart is at stake through the course of the book—the anatomical heart of Fridman Hayes’ beloved and terminally ill father, who might break up “a fistfight or a universe,” and the heart of the daughter, who will soon lose him. Language too, is at stake-- “fatherless, I am in my heart not speaking/ any language,” the narrator muses, and meditates on Cyrillic letters “weighed in grams, as valuable as bread.” This book will nourish those who grieve, bringing solace and beauty, which, survived, can save. — Katie Farris, author of Standing in the Forest of Being Alive
"What John Ashbery describes as a 'visible core' in his seminal poem 'Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror,' where once, there may have been 'no way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.' Her “repudiation of now” reconstructs fresh expectations for the 'indefinite future' still full of past conflicts. Nevertheless, whether employing accident or will, this writer liberates the energy we need 'to get it right' in the next life that only the imagination can offer."
--Tinderbox Poetry Journal
"Doubleness is vital to the experience of reading One Strange Country-one feels pulled with the speaker as she is pulled between languages, countries, and memories. Hayes' poetry shows us that yes, a person can exist in multiple places at once-his is how history acts on the body. Human lives are interstitial, why should our poems be any less so?"
--EcoTheo Review
"Hayes's restless and searching debut addresses the pain and disorientation of assimilation alongside the comforts of family....emotionally resonant and insightful....This debut provides an honest and moving tribute to the immigrant experience."
“Like someone displaced as a child and, after everything, living a perfectly ordinary, loving life, One Strange Country craves an ‘ordinary–– / type of happiness.’ Like family, like the past, ‘An exile’s life is planned out one day at a time.’ Like lonely, determined, maternal and ongoing––it’s complicated. ‘If silence had a sound, it would sound like loss without a heartbeat.’ Stella Hayes lives it. And we do, too, in this marvelous debut collection of poems.”
—Ralph Angel, author of the poetry collection Neither World (1995), winner of the James Laughlin Award, winner of the 2007 PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry, and author of most recent poetry collection Your Moon
There is a raw thread of loss—of homeland, of family, of innocence—weaving itself through Stella Hayes’ exquisite and deeply compelling debut collection, One Strange Country. These poems embrace the reader with their beauty even as the darkness of their reflections reveal a wisdom born of experience. With its restless reckonings and mature power, One Strange Country is a book to hold close and treasure.
—David St. John, most recent poetry collection The Last Troubadour: Selected and New Poems
“One Strange Country is as much a collection of maps as it is a collection of poems. They illuminate locations, meditating on what it means to leave a home—to leave a country—and start anew. At turns gleeful and elegiac, grateful and defiant, this book considers the state of exile. In “Monolith,” Hayes writes, “I am in a memory, in the generation I lived among you. / I stand against a world that has no use for paper.” The poet never shies away from her lonely mission, guiding readers through landscapes both seen and unseen.”
—Erica Wright, Poetry Editor and a Senior Editor at Guernica Magazine, former Editorial Board member for Alice James Books, author of Poetry collections Instructions for Killing the Jackal and All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned
“There is an unflinching quality in Hayes’s attention to the world, or worlds, both interior and exterior, and the poems communicate first and foremost, a determination to seek out, or hunt down, elusive truths. As Hayes suggests in ‘Walking Through the Underworld,’ we are all from somewhere, which is to say, we are all haunted by origins, but we live in a kind of permanent exile from those ‘moorings of starting out.’”
—DeSales Harrison, Associate editor of FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Associate Professor of English at Oberlin College, author of the novel, The Waters & The Wild