About the Book
In Viable, Julie Hensley has woven a beautifully contemplated life, as the speaker becomes daughter, woman, writer, lover, mother, and branches outward into the voices of historical women who share the pain only mothers can. Sensual, intuitively musical, and incredibly observant, these poems turn a perceptive lens on the natural world and uncover a spiritual interconnectedness. Hensley's poems reveal how life crashes into us and through us, how at times we feel lifted by this storm, and at others we feel like we may be going under, or perhaps sometimes both, such as when the speaker after staying up all night with a sobbing child notices the "sun slow / through the kitchen window: / a wafer / dissolving into morning."
--Matt Rasmussen
To enter Julie Hensley's Viable is not to step but to plunge. . . With Hensley's guide, we travel through deftly rendered landscapes of the Great Plains and the rural South. We study the language of horses and historical figures. We probe marriage, miscarriage, childbirth, and child-rearing, "the things people plant to anchor themselves/ beneath so much sky." We hear our own fears and wants echoing back to us from the deeply human center of this book.
--Julie Marie Wade, author of Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems and When I Was Straight: Poems
In the rich and vivid poems of Viable, Julie Hensley rings the changes of a girl child's life, from riding stick-horses in her yard in Big Stone Gap to sexual discovery after sixteen summers, to homesickness in her first apartment, then to love, marriage and, motherhood. The path may be familiar, but none of it is simple, and there are sharp turns of grief and reckoning along the way. Rooted in the natural world--mountain, desert, prairie, seashore--and seeing herself as a creature among creatures, Hensley offers us words of life in all its uncertainty, knowing that "Creation is still a gift/ a yolk bobbing uncertainly/ inside a fragile shell."
--George Ella Lyon, Kentucky Poet Laureate 2015-2016, author of Many-Storied House
About the Author :
Julie Hensley grew up on a sheep farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Now she makes her home in Kentucky with her husband, the writer R. Dean Johnson, and their children. She teaches in Eastern Kentucky University's low-residency MFA program, the Bluegrass Writers Studio. Her stories and poems have appeared in dozens of journals, including The Southern Review, Saranac Review, Indiana Review, and Blackbird. A cycle of her short fiction, Landfall: A Ring of Stories, won the 2015 Ohio State University Press Non/fiction Award and will be published in summer 2016. Contact her at juliehensleywriter.com.
Review :
In Viable, Julie Hensley has woven a beautifully contemplated life, as the speaker becomes daughter, woman, writer, lover, mother, and branches outward into the voices of historical women who share the pain only mothers can. Sensual, intuitively musical, and incredibly observant, these poems turn a perceptive lens on the natural world and uncover a spiritual interconnectedness. Hensley's poems reveal how life crashes into us and through us, how at times we feel lifted by this storm, and at others we feel like we may be going under, or perhaps sometimes both, such as when the speaker after staying up all night with a sobbing child notices the "sun slow / through the kitchen window: / a wafer / dissolving into morning." --Matt Rasmussen To enter Julie Hensley's Viable is not to step but to plunge. "Here memory is physical and startling," her speaker confides, and the same must be said of these poems--each one delicate and precise, pulsing a vital heat. With Hensley's guide, we travel through deftly rendered landscapes of the Great Plains and the rural South. We study the language of horses and historical figures. We probe marriage, miscarriage, childbirth, and child-rearing, "the things people plant to anchor themselves/ beneath so much sky." We hear our own fears and wants echoing back to us from the deeply human center of this book. Like the speaker's young son, we learn to trust that "No matter where we go, the moon follows." --Julie Marie Wade, author of Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems and When I Was Straight: Poems In the rich and vivid poems of Viable, Julie Hensley rings the changes of a girl child's life, from riding stick-horses in her yard in Big Stone Gap to sexual discovery after sixteen summers, to homesickness in her first apartment, then to love, marriage and, motherhood. The path may be familiar, but none of it is simple, and there are sharp turns of grief and reckoning along the way. Rooted in the natural world-mountain, desert, prairie, seashore-and seeing herself as a creature among creatures, Hensley offers us words of life in all its uncertainty, knowing that "Creation is still a gift/ a yolk bobbing uncertainly/ inside a fragile shell." --George Ella Lyon (Kentucky Poet Laureate 2015-2016), Many-Storied House
