Heartbreak Tree: Poems

By Pauletta Hansel

A poetic exploration of the intersection of gender and place in Appalachia that does the work of that remembering, honoring the responsibility of the poet to speak the forbidden stories of her own life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Madville Publishing
• Release date: Mar 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781948692892

Book preview

ALSO BY PAULETTA HANSEL:

Friend (Dos Madres Press, 2020)

Coal Town Photograph (Dos Madres Press, 2019)

Palindrome (Dos Madres Press, 2017)

Winner of the 2017 Weatherford Award in Poetry

Tangle (Dos Madres Press, 2015)

What I Did There (Dos Madres Press, 2011)

The Lives We Live in Houses (Wind Publications, 2011)

First Person (Dos Madres Press, 2007)

Divining (WovenWord Press, 2002)

Copyright © 2022 by Pauletta Hansel

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

FIRST EDITION

Requests for permission to reprint or reuse material from this work should be sent to:

Permissions

Madville Publishing

PO Box 358

Lake Dallas, TX 75065

Cover Design: Jacqueline Davis

Cover Art: painting by Angelyn DeBord

ISBN:

978-1-948692-88-5 paperback

978-1-948692-89-2 ebook

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941186

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I.

Story

Letter to Myself, 15

Dirt

The Road

Home Is the Place Where, When You Have to Go There, You Only Think About How to Get Out

Story

Poem Written While Contemplating a Newly Dug Southern Kentucky Grave

For Beauty

Joy

I Take My Mother with Me Everywhere

The Stepmother’s Lament

Returned, Addressee Unknown

Story

Some Facts about Home

Kanawha

It snows across the mountains

II.

Dear Moon

Morning, Loretto Motherhouse, Late November

After

Postcard from Age 60

Story

Heartbreak Tree

Pattern

For Sarah, at 24

Perhaps all my poems begin with I want

Grandmother Questions in This Time of Social Distance

First Memory of Pleasure

The Blessing

Reflection

Letter to Myself, 15

Things I Would Never Say in a Poem

Nostalgia

III.

Little Wren’s Song

For Sarah, on the Eve of Her Wedding

At the Lifestyle Center

Dear Poem

Blocking the Dead

While Googling Adrienne Rich the Internet Gives Me Adrienne Barbeau, Known for Her Two Enormous Talents

Storm

Story

Those big-boned, black-haired country boys

Me Too

This Is the Poem That Has Been Staring at You for Some Time Now

Letter to Myself, 15

Interview

IV.

Complicit (A Brief History)

Their War on Poverty

Unto the Least of These

To Break a Thing

So maybe it’s true

This Is Not a Drill

Postcard from the Dark Woods’ Edge

I Confess

Saying It

Mundus Novus

Story

These Stories I Tell You Now

To You

Letter to Myself, 15

Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

For RGH, a mother to these words

I.

STORY

I don’t mean to be ungrateful.

I was bred for wanting more, the way

a racehorse is bred for the win’s scent.

Those impossible legs like winged twigs

that will snap in a high wind.

What moves us onward is the same,

sometimes, as what breaks us to the ground.

Here’s a story about my grandfather

that I don’t like to tell,

how he found a WWII deserter’s bundle

tucked inside a cave,

how he kept the money, then turned the guy in

for a