Strange Hymn

"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 a 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 'awake 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

"In reading Strange Hymn, we follow the glorious reasoning of this poet as they move through questions of the spirit and individual. Kucharczyk doesn’t shy away from painful insights, she states things straightforwardly, and quietly, which somehow makes the book’s keen observations, both harder to bear and clear. Read this haunting group of poems and you too may find yourself, suddenly in a drama of 'Curtains' crying on the floor, overwhelmed by shadows that often appear without an overture. Or the feeling of your own Blood rivering 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