Poetic Conversations: Destruction and Regeneration in Sara Henning’s Burn
What do you think of when you hear the word “burn”? Do you think of a fast and brutal annihilation? Or do you think of a new start — a phoenix rising from the ashes to fly freely?
Award-winning poet Sara Henning incorporates both the destructive and regenerative potential of fire in her poetry collection Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), which was a Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection. The collection is divided into three sections, the first of which is introduced by a quote from Beloved, Toni Morrison’s novel about a family haunted by trauma: “It made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too.” With this introduction, Henning sets the stage for the juxtaposition of evil and good, pain and pleasure, death and rebirth.
The most painfully beautiful poem in this first section is “Ghost Story.” Henning’s speaker describes the destruction of Savannah, Georgia, during General William Tecumseh Sherman’s brutal March to the Sea during the American Civil War. She also remembers her babysitter, a teenager named Laurie, who wore “Daisy Dukes razored to graze her / freckled thighs” and a Pink Floyd tee-shirt, and “[pierced] her ears with ice / and safety pins.” Thirteen-year-old Laurie would sneak out of the house to meet up with boys. Simply put, she was a cool older girl whom the young speaker admired.
The speaker remembers:
“Her red hair,
I remember how it curled against my face
when I wrapped my arms around her.Some days I traced the dark circles
under her eyes. Laurie, she clings to me
now like Spanish moss, that wet,heavy hunger.”
The speaker then reveals that young Laurie was raped and murdered in Savannah. (In her notes at the end of the collection, Henning notes that the Savannah she grew up in, before John Berendt’s nonfiction bestseller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil made it into a tourist destination, was rife with violence and poverty.) Laurie’s killer was never found, and her spirit remains with the speaker and their shared city. As Henning says in her conclusion, “Even Sherman / would not burn it down.”
The tender and dreamy description of Laurie, a loving figure from the speaker’s childhood, collide with the horribly violent death she experienced. In “Ghost Story,” Laurie is the phoenix rising from the ashes of a haunted city.
The speaker also introduces her relationships with her parents in this section of Burn. Her father, who passed away when the speaker was a child, is mentioned in “A Brief History of Fathers”:
“When my father died —
Nickels in the jukebox. Honeysuckle in the yard.
Like his father, he’s dead man, dead beat, gone.”
The speaker insinuates that her father was more of a ghost than a solid presence in her early life. On the other hand, her mother was very much present. In “Letter in the Shape of a Banyan Tree,” the speaker mourns her mother years after her death, saying, “Mother, where does it end, this story of us?” She recognizes that death does not necessarily mean the end of a relationship or meaningful connection with the people she loves; she is still tethered to her parents, as she is tethered to her memories of Laurie.
The second section of Burn begins with a quote from Laura Esquivel’s novel Like Water for Chocolate, a book that ends with a bittersweet explosion of fire that consumes two star-crossed lovers. Henning quotes, “Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves.” And like the characters in Esquivel’s tragic romance, this section of Burn reiterates the themes of love lost in flames.
The thirteen-part poem in this section is titled “A Brief History of Fire,” and it describes and reimagines the possible death of a fireman in the television drama Chicago Fire. Captain Matthew Casey’s life almost ends in flames, and the speaker notes of the episode, “I’m watching a wife watch her husband die.” As Captain Casey’s wife exchanges what she thinks are last words with her husband via CB radio, she “searches his voice as sparks tongue through his boots, / thinks hope, like hell, is just a four-letter word. Like fire. Like fear. Like future, untethered. Like over.” And in fact, Casey’s future will not be revealed till the following season of Chicago Fire. Is his life over, as his wife fears and as the speaker suspects? Was he consumed by the very fire he had pledged his wife to fight?
Later in the poem, the speaker reveals her father was also a firefighter. The speaker says, “Loving a man is loving a body with the threat / of ash all around it — you’re his kerosene.” Again, two contradictory ideas — love and loss — are combined. Love doesn’t exist here without the threat of its end.
In the following sections of “A Brief History of Fire,” Henning slowly walks back through the history of the speaker’s father and mother, and how they came together, then came apart. She goes further back, into the speaker’s father’s childhood, to better understand a man she did not know well. One of Henning’s strengths in Burn is how effortlessly she floats between time; it both collapses and expands in the world of her poetry.
She returns to love and loss at the end of the multi-part poem, asking, “Is love our legacy or does it kill?” In a heartbreaking passage, Henning’s speaker once again imagines Captain Casey in the fire, becoming so overwrought herself that she can feel the pain of the fictional character — and readers feel that pain as well.
“Without breaking
the fourth wall, I’m leaping into the hothouse
of another woman’s pain. I’m watching a wife
watch her husband die in a fire, which is to say –
She’s losing everything she loves.”
Burn’s third section opens with a quote from the poet Carolyn Forché, who traveled to El Salvador with Amnesty International during the country’s civil war. She wrote about her experiences in her collection The Country Between Us, which is quoted at the opening of this section: “The heart is the toughest part of the body. / Tenderness is in the hands.”
This tenderness envelops this last section as the speaker pays tribute to her husband. Once again opening up timelines across years, Henning slowly leads the reader through the speaker’s life as she has sex for the first time, searches for a man who meets her at her level, and navigates the ups and downs of marriage. In “Meditation at Panda Express,” the speaker idles in the fast-food chain’s parking lot, ruminating about the changes in her relationship with her husband:
“Saturdays, husband, we used to split an Orange
Julius, suck until we could taste each other’s salt.We’d summer in beachside condos, sip salt
-rimmed margaritas. Now, I fake
joy when you won’t look at me. Orange
you glad I didn’t say banana? I joke. Nights,
you’re no better than a ghost.”
From the erotic beginning of their relationship to the more ordinary days of their marriage, Henning’s poems in this section swing from high romance to more stressful life events, including facing tropical storms, surviving the COVID-19 pandemic and awaiting the results of a skin biopsy. The two lovers reach a kind of equilibrium in “Drive-In Nights.” They watch Die Hard at the drive-in, which is a movie about (among other things) a couple on the brink of divorce. Like the opening quotes at the beginning of each section and the pop culture references throughout Burn, the mention of this iconic action film perfectly places the reader into the speaker’s mindset.
As the speaker remembers in “Drive-In Nights,” “I married you, husband, when you side / swiped my heart… Once, we caught fire / when we touched.” Even if they have settled into more contentment than passion, she still recalls the initial sparks of their meeting. Amid the background of the action movie, the speaker tells her husband, “Let’s fire / off hope like a fatal bullet. Let’s get hitched / again. Any merciful // justice of the peace must side with fire / when he sees it.” Inspired by the blazing theatrics of the film, the speaker reaffirms her commitment to her husband, seeing them as a couple still lit by their own loving fire.
In the collection’s last poem — the eponymous “Burn” — the speaker returns to her parents. She remembers her father, who had “signed his name // in blood” in her mother’s womb, and her mother, of whom Henning writes, “Her body, it held me like she hadn’t given up.” In the present, the speaker concludes, “My thighs are engines, leave traces of fire / as I rise up. Watch me rise up.” Just as Henning’s collection moved back and forth between the potential destruction of fires to the possibilities inherent in the new beginnings created by something burned clean away, she both embraces and releases her past in one last juxtaposition in Burn as she rises herself, a phoenix emerging from the ashes of her past.
(Explore/purchase the book via Southern Illinois University Press.)
