Overview

Stella Fridman Hayes's second poetry collection, Father Elegies draws from an impressive range of literary forms, from familiar couplets and tercets to erasure, blackout poems, and hybrid prose. While stylistically dexterous and technically agile, Hayes' work is unified by its deep and moving engagement with the poetics of alterity. What does it mean to be othered by and through language? How does one reconcile a self and a sociocultural landscape that are at odds? And a self and a genealogy that are to some extent opposed? As the book unfolds, Hayes considers the role of legacy-from familial history to the inheritances of literature, art, and culture-in shaping the self, offering a fraught origin story that ultimately transcends the personal. Indeed, Hayes effortlessly situates this narrative within the context of war, necessary social justice movements, and global upheaval in poems that are as gorgeously rendered as they are timely.

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Reviews

""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 ""Haunted by an iridescent sense 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 ""Stella 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,"" and ""Home,"" and for this whole superb collection.""-peter campion, author of One Summer Evening at the Falls

Author Information

Stella Hayes is the author of two poetry collections, Father Elegies (What Books Press, 2024) and One Strange Country (What Books Press, 2020). She grew up in Brovary, a suburb outside of Kyiv, Ukraine, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Hayes earned an M.F.A. in poetry from NYU, where she taught in the undergraduate creative writing program and served as poetry editor and assistant fiction editor of Washington Square Review. Her work has appeared in Image, The Poetry Project, Four Way Review, and Stanford University Press, among others. Hayes is a contributing editor at Tupelo Quarterly. She lives with her husband and two children in Larchmont, New York.

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