One Sun Storm

One Sun Storm uses a diverse variety forms, including image-driven diaries, long poems, and nursery rhyme, that interplay and echo each other throughout the experience of the book. The effect is of a central obsession or storm, in which cultural, spiritual, political and personal subjects--including the idea of the West, the presence of war, language, love¬¬--are elucidated simultaneously, implicit or interwoven with lyrical statements, images, questions, and iterations. One Sun Storm explores repetition and reiteration as a process of engaging experience, and perceptions at times bleed over into the surreal in their metamorphosis, in images of dogs on their heads or trees turning blue. The world burns with the imagination, yet Hartigan never gives up the desire for, and drive towards, the clearest and most present accounting she can make. This is poetry of immersion bringing the reader to the edge of experience in all its frailties.

"More interested in the generative possibilities of questions than in their answers, the well-crafted, rangy free-verse lyrics of Hartigan's Colorado Prize — winning debut obliquely interrogate humanity's relationships with larger forces, both natural and man-made, as well as notions of love and motherhood. Nature itself is reshaped simply by virtue of man's way of looking at it: 'Here the animals/ we've plucked/ from books or fields, [are] placed// into our hearts/ like lanterns.' The thrilling title poem, a cascade of meticulously described actions and things, views many created objects as though they are part of nature, equating 'One bus arriving with blue and black windows' with 'One goldfish darting six inches.' Yet amid all this transformation, a sense of paralysis surfaces, as if seeing beyond appearances merely reveals other appearances. Fans of Jorie Graham will find much that is familiar — and much to like — in Hartigan's careful lines and obsessive, off-center observations. Hartigan distinguishes herself from her peers — she shares with many young poets a hip penchant for fragmentation and elliptical imagery — with her careful eye ('Wood chips/ burning/ by the pharmacy') , her ear for the ways soft and sharp sounds make music together ('one leaf from among/ the accumulate of leaves'), and her earnest search for 'One voice rising and falling in one chorus.'" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)