The Dropped Hand

Terry Blackhawk

“Death gains on us. It honors neither time nor place nor human quest for meaning. Its emblem might be, as it is in these fine elegies, a dropped hand of playing cards: ‘abrupt and final/silence.’ If that were all, the bravery of the poet would be much, but Terry Blackhawk wrests from this strict vista a powerful antithesis. With patience and wisdom and, above all, with love, she crafts the vessel that counters dissolution. It is poetry’s dream to do just that.”
–Linda Gregerson
“I love the poetry of Terry Blackhawk, above all else, for its heart, always searching for ‘something bursting with spring and belief.’ Through the poems in The Dropped Hand, she teaches us both how to hold on and how to let go of those we love. These compassionate poems reach out through the complex world to find the connections that sustain us. She celebrates our exposed places, the places where we are most vulnerable and most human. We so often cover up those places—it takes a magician like Terry Blackhawk to reveal to us what was there all along.”
–Jim Daniels
“In The Dropped Hand, Terry Blackhawk masterfully weaves threads of loss and grief into a fine tapestry that is both personal and universal. This is, I think, Dr. Blackhawk’s finest and most moving collection.”
–Naomi Long Madgett