Praise for CLEAVE
“I believe in / the beginning, how it is / always shuffling backward...” Here where time is pleated, where memory moves in each word like a room, Darla Himeles’s poems are spacious and clear, yet defy a single reading and are inexhaustible and complex. Such work touches the “ghost speck in blood” and is the ghost speck itself. So I am reading branches. I am reading a life. Such language opens a grief in me, even as it insists that to read is to breathe and have one’s breathing shaped by an encounter with another. I learn from the attention in these poems. Such attention is deep care and adds and adds and adds such love and dimension to my life.
—Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria
The word cleave, with its opposite meanings, with its lightly hidden nod to motherhood (Eve), is the perfect title for this book of both leave-taking and greeting (ave). Familial domestic violence, queer love (“kiss me for the born agains / kiss me while they mourn our sin”), and the desire for a child (“ghost speck in blood”) ground these poems that sever and cling, rage and sing, and offer depths of feeling through the sensuous clamor of syllables. In her debut full-length collection, Darla Himeles announces herself as a poet of startling clarity and uncommon beauty.
—Michael Waters, author of Caw
Darla Himeles braves traumatic, childhood memories of male violence—“dear/father, dear terrible man”—to achieve poems of soul-wrenching power. “I still hear the shriek of glass,” she writes, “and speak its broken language.” The drive toward psychic wholeness undergirds poems of love and friendship. A playful celebration of eros and political liberation, “Kiss Me” celebrates the long-term lesbian relationship that sustains her. Unsparing in the details and resolute in carving a path toward love, Himeles writes poems that pulsate with truth-telling and hope.
—Robin Becker, author of The Black Bear Inside Me
[In Cleave,] Himeles delves into childhood trauma and also looks outward at the threats facing refugees, women hiking alone, and more. Sometimes this violence is shockingly rendered, but the reading experience is tempered by the extraordinary things Himeles does with language.
—Kathryn Ionata, in Philadelphia Stories
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Praise for Flesh Enough
“When I bleed, / I touch everything,” Darla Himeles teases one conservative cousin, and in poems loving and transgressive, affectionate and angry, she confronts the “annihilation” of creatures small (passenger pigeon) and large (blue whale), including humans (always small), such as Jewish ancestors who inhaled the almond scent of Zyklon B and, more recently, the Black and Native American victims of sustained and authorized violence. “My heart doesn’t ache,” wrote Adrienne Rich; “sometimes though it rages.” In these beautiful and urgent poems, Himeles’ heart rages against our approaching extinctions.
—Michael Waters
Look at Darla Himeles, there on the razor’s edge of survival as a Jew, note taker of past and future extinctions, a poet fearless of science, unafraid of love or laughter. Listen as she sings love songs to the cephalopod dead, the manatees’ eyes “cataracted by microplastics,” and the Colorado that “forgets it’s a river.” Smile as she imagines T.S. Eliot becoming a blue crab. Meditate with her on our own eyes, possible “reservoirs of the Anthropocene’s / last sunlit hours.” Himeles helps us know our place as specks of a star, kin to all animals, in poems that dance with the pleasure of language.
—Alicia Ostriker
Whether she is describing the day Adrienne Rich died or how our weeping may sound like mating songs, Darla Himeles captures all that it is to be a poet, today, right now. Her poems have melody & a lilac kind of voice, but what is most striking is how she guides you through our human condition, our place on this earth, & the ways in which we hurt & love. Flesh Enough is a beautiful & important debut.
—Yesenia Montilla
Himeles uses powerful restraint when interweaving the everyday with unspeakable destruction and the endangerment of both animals and humanity.
—Amy Small McKinney
(read review)
Where to find Cleave and Flesh Enough
ONLINE: When possible, please order directly from Get Fresh Books:
IN BOOKSTORES: Support independent book sellers by ordering Cleave and Flesh Enough through your local bookshop. I especially recommend Big Blue Marble (Philadelphia), Small World Books (Los Angeles), and Blue Hill Books (Blue Hill, Maine). Or, use Bookshop.org.
AT LUNAR BEAUTY BOUTIQUE: Gratitude to Lunar Beauty Boutique for supporting local writers & for carrying my books.
DIRECTLY: For a signed/inscribed copy, please use this request/order form, or say hello at an upcoming reading.