the song around us

by kat hayes

Just past the split rail fences, Kat Hayes’ poetry collection The Song Around Us extends a precarious invitation to reinhabit time and landscape. Unsure whether to marvel or cut and run, the poems follow tracks in the woods, examine artifacts, and slip through the interstices. Images beckon from plowed fields and volcanic plains, from mountains flecked with moonshine stills to waking, windswept meadows. And in the midst of the natural world is the ever-mysterious province of the body—wounded and insistent and singing.

praise for the song around us

In her compelling debut, The Song Around Us, Kat Hayes stitches a rich, lyric narrative from broken images, rending music from silence and stillness from the thrashing of bird wings. So as not to be undone by a crumbling landscape fighting to take her with it, Hayes’ speaker doesn’t learn to survive the wreckage of an unchangeable past—she weighs the danger and damage “as far down the road as [she] can” in each direction and teaches herself to “turn everything to sound” in its absence, seeing how even rock shows the way “to be alone,” which she knows is not the same as being lonely. There is grit in the machinery of this speaker’s life, and through her commitment to deep looking we bear generational witness to wildness, tenderness, mourning, and hope alongside her in these lush poems.

—LISA FAY COUTLEY, author of HOST and Small Girl

If attention, as Paul Celan said, is the natural prayer of the soul, then Kat Hayes’ The Song Around Us is, as she writes, “the pulse behind the chaos” of her ever-expanding past.  Hayes handles the precise, untouchable details of that past as one might approach a sudden, severe wound: stunned, attentive, surprisingly steady.  It’s her voice—confusion coolly composed—that gives these poems their lyrical verve, heft and flight.  It’s not long before I realize Hayes has placed me among the particulars of her universe.  I believe it all, especially when I read these poems aloud; somehow Hayes transforms my listening into a kind of singing.  Hayes reminds me how there is no better news, despite it all, than this: “you should know / you can sing your way back.”

—ALEXANDER LONG

The landscape is alluring, luminous, and terrifying in these poems. Hayes peels back objects, sounds, time, and we peep the vibrant life hiding beneath. In a visceral way she evokes the body’s dance with mortality, the powerful relationship between man and animal, mother and daughter, lovers in the wild. Her gift for vivid imagery is astonishing. Her subject matter tosses between the familiar and unfamiliar. Thoughtful, serious, and always rewarding. This book is an instant winner.

—ILHEOMA NWACHUKWU, author of Japa and Other Stories

Katrina Hayes’ aptly titled The Song Around Us, sings full-throated. Elegies, odes, narratives of coming of age in the grit-imbedded landscape of “rusted furnaces and the metal intestines of factories” are imbued with “the heart’s iambic thump.” Almost prayerful meditations on unspoiled nature, on the awe of a parent watching her child explore, these all hum lyrically. Some collections beg to be read in order; most are read randomly. Hayes’ book rewards the reader who reads either way. Each poem is a gem to be discovered and savored, but the reader who starts with poem one and follows to the last will be rewarded by discoveries. A speaker who writes to heal her father becomes the mother who learns “from my daughter how to access the animal self.” Heart-pounding rhythms follow quiet near-silences then swing back. Take the journey with Hayes, then reread favorites over and over.

—LIZ ABRAMS-MORLEY, author of Beholder and Because Time

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