Amarillo, Texas, to many of those who pass through on their way to the "postcard" mountain scenery of northern New Mexico and Colorado, is the flattest and ugliest place they have ever seen. If, however, they were blessed with the eyes and heightened sensibilities of Chera Hammons, they would be awakened to a world of endless beauty and mystery, a world which captivated "literally" for over a year and "spiritually" for a lifetime none other than the major American artist, Georgia O'Keeffe. Hammons's meticulously crafted poems peel away the layers of the ostensible "otherness" of the natural world, revealing its kernels of mystical profundity to the wide-eyed astonishment of the reader. From grackles to abandoned puppies, tornadoes to tumbleweeds, raptors to horses, bomb manufacturing to sparrows, and human epiphanies to heartbreak, Hammons demonstrates time and time again, with consummate poetic skill, that she "learned how to wring beauty / from anything she could." -Larry D. Thomas, Member, Texas Institute of Letters, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate

The Traveler's Guide to Bomb City

Literature & Fiction

Hammons, Chera

Poetry

purple flag

Chera Hammons' 'Recycled Explosions' places us in an elusive and at times frightening narrative, moving along Judas-filled landscapes where we may or may not "find a way back to what [we] know." Perhaps whatever inheritance we once had-or believed in-is gone. Still, Hammons "keeps vigil." Her poems remind us that, despite the times we live in, we seek to be blessed, even if the angel we wrestle turns out to be only a "reflection" of ourselves.

Recycled Explosions

Ink Brush Press

Anna and John, a master saddle maker, have created a quiet existence for themselves in rural Vermont, a rugged landscape where coyotes roam, bears threaten the livestock, and poachers trespass. When John is murdered in the woods near their home, chronically ill Anna hides his death in a desperate effort to ensure her own survival and suppress long–buried secrets.

Monarchs of the Northeast Kingdom

Parenting & Relationships

Torrey House Press

Maps of Injury tracks territory from the body to heredity, Southwestern country roads to horse-mottled pastures, and the kitchen sink to the well outside the house from which it is fed as these poems contemplate a woman's autonomy within her landscape. Here is a wife, daughter, and horsewoman coming to terms with chronic illness and the lingering effects of a previous abusive marriage. The injury mapped across this narrative inspires endearment for creatures bridled, companioned, or left by the roadside to die. Hammons shows us how love looks with every poetic line she worries into a body's history even after it's gone. A suffering horse is coaxed into its grave and there breathes its last before earth covers it. An unidentified body is found in a field where people come to examine and perhaps claim it as the speaker considers her own worth. It is a worth seemingly altered by an ill body which has been coarsely examined by doctors, by loved ones, by strangers, and in relation to the women in the speaker's past who dealt with terminal diseases. She wonders: who will remember her after she dies? How will her attachments be memorialized? Will future generations, at seeing how a body lies in a grave and what sickness still eats at the bones, know that she was wanted? Animals both wild and domestic alight and fade into these questions and the landscapes that consume them. Here the body's sovereignty is considered within the relationships that interpret it from the outside--relationships that the woman understands, in all of their imposition and dismissal, are also evidence that she has been loved.

Maps of Injury

Sundress Publications

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hammons, Chera. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hammons, Chera

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hammons, Chera. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Traveler's Guide to Bomb City

Recycled Explosions

Monarchs of the Northeast Kingdom

Maps of Injury