“I’ll tell you everything I know. Though there might not be much to tell,” confesses the speaker in Strange Hymn by Carlene Kucharczyk, in a meticulously crafted lyrical journey exploring morality and humanity. The poems here grapple with understanding physical loss: “I wanted / to know once and definitively our animal bodies / were not all we were. It is shameful to be this fragile.” They also engage with the more abstract slipping away of memory and time: “Since I was born, I have been forgetting. Forgetting what I have wanted to remember.” Kucharczyk’s insightful poems blur the lines between history and myth, love and grief, song and silence.
Caught between lamenting the passage of time and rejoicing in small beauties, she writes, “I tell you, I wish we could stay here longer / in this hotel of lost grandeur, this palace of interesting disarray, / and stay here with these pieces of the impersonal past / that have somehow not yet outlasted their small lights.” Each moment reflects on our ephemeral lives from musings on art and nature to reflections on the self, asking “Is a mirror a sort of glass house? / And, is there a way to see ourselves besides through the glass?”
As readers traverse this collection, they learn how the body sings, the many iterations of Mary, what sirens truly think of Odysseus, how a Morning Glory unfurls, and lessons in orthodontics, but most importantly, how to live with absence. Kucharczyk is a master of manipulating time and space through her dynamic use of form, creating a narrative that begs, “After I’m gone, don’t bury my body— / Burn it, and turn it into song.”
Carlene Kucharczyk is a brilliant poet and Strange Hymn is the best debut I have read in many years. But in this age of too much empty praise, what does that mean? It means that there is a poet with sensibility all her own, one who sees a body as a little human cathedral to be wholly occupied with the singing. With hymns. There is much love in this book, and wisdom. You will find a poet who wears her learning, and her considerable lyric gifts, lightly. She instructs how to be 'aware in wonder.' She delights. It is a brilliant, beautiful debut.'—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic, a New York Times Notable Book
'The sure and tenuous music of Carlene Kucharczyk’s work reminds me why we call such poems lyric. 'Wholly occupied with the singing,' each one invites us, with quiet urgency, into its own resonant space. If this marvelously Strange Hymn sounds like nothing we’ve ever heard, it’s exactly what we’ve been listening for.'—Jody Gladding, author of I entered without words
'Read this haunting group of poems and you too may find yourself, suddenly in a soft furor of 'Curtains' crying on the floor, overwhelmed by shadows that often appear without an overture. Or the feeling of your own Blood rivering as you move through these most compelling songs.'—Vievee Francis, author of The Shared World
'Reading Carlene Kucharczyk’s debut Strange Hymn feels like following the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole into a world that is both familiar and strange. These poems force us to reexamine our own ideas about what it means to exist and why. Kucharczyk pushes language to the edge of what it can do, making it leap and wind through the pages, unrestrained. It is playful and full of whimsy while hurling itself toward larger and darker truths. This is a voice that insists on singing into the darkness by reaching into the past, drawing wisdom from poets, philosophers, artists, and loved ones who have gone before. It challenges myth and questions religion. It is fierce and tender, a joy and an offering.'—Chelsea Krieg, interim director of the MFA Program, North Carolina State University
‘Does the poem persist to pass the time? To keep the writer (and reader) company? In Strange Hymn, the poem is song—not siren song of doom, but rather song as echolocation. Each poem sounds the distance between this world and the next possibility, revisiting stories we have made a home in. They hold a space for wonder and suggest a way to meet the glare and somehow still to gleam.’—Abigail Chabitnoy, author of In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful
