{"product_id":"the-holy-or-the-broken-hallelujah-9781646627578","title":"The Holy or the Broken Hallelujah","description":"In this impressive first collection, Kristina Hakanson gives us-in both free verse and lyric prose forms-poems of considerable range and power, most poignantly those about her beloved father's terminal illness. In one, she makes this striking and quintessentially human confession: \"I'm about to say goodbye \/ to my bedridden father, \/ the first man I loved, \/ the only one whose heart I refuse to break, \/ ashamed that I ever did, \/ if I ever did. \/ I'm sure I did.\" Hakanson's work evokes a fraught yet wrenchingly beautiful world-a \"heaven's underside\" in which \"Each sorrow converted to ice \/ grows warm in the palm of your hand.\"\u003cstrong\u003e-Paulann Petersen, \u003c\/strong\u003eOregon Poet Laureate Emerita\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBoth elegiac and celebratory, these poems derive their strength from the real world around us: wooden spoons, egg-beaters, a coffee cup, the teeth of a harrow-touched here and there by an element of the surreal (a wolf in a cello). I admire their clean language and plainspoken balance, from the mundane to the eternal-their realization that \"Whole lives are lived on the dirt\/ which long ago came from the stars\".\u003cstrong\u003e-Joseph Millar\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Finishing Line Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50497075249426,"sku":"9781646627578","price":13.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_c96a49c4-0c6e-4d20-a0a7-43178c2a721e.jpg?v=1730706160","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/the-holy-or-the-broken-hallelujah-9781646627578","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}