When I Say the Bones I Mean the Bones

In taxidermy one encounters the word 'articulate, ' which means both to give shape to something and to express its systemic whole. The word means more or less the same thing in regards to language as well, though with language the system and shape are a part of a larger map of sounds and signs than that which is contained within the visible world. Amanda Hawkins articulates and is articulate. These poems reassemble bodies so that we may experience them as living or once living beings: the dead whale, the box of ash, the beloveds of one's life, intermingled in the dust of living and the decay of dying. Articulation is also a synonym for eloquence, and in these poems especially this is true: faithful renderings, vatic cries, devotional meditations: a landscape, a seascape and an inscape intricately involved in each others' symmetries. A monumental debut.

-D.A. Powell, author of Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys and Chronic

Even doubt is a flame," writes Amanda Hawkins in this beautiful new collection of poems. At the heart of this book is personal loss, hemmed by the science of bodies transformed into ash. But the bones are the bones as death, pandemics, wars, the opioid crisis, and the threat of the sixth mass extinction worry these poems at every turn. Following their gaze along the skeleton of a blue whale and seeing a cathedral, I fell in love with this book. I love Hawkins' undimmable delight for the places-body and world. They invite us to be like stone and sink down and down where (somehow) the hope lives.

-Amber Flora Thomas, author of Eye of Water

Between desert and ocean, the living and the dead, bone and ash Amanda Hawkins dissects our fervent need to grieve, not only personal loss, but the loss of our ever-changing physical landscapes, for the solidity of the earth under our feet and a faith in all that does not fail us (knowing full well it will). When I Say the Bones I Mean the Bones takes a microscope to the core of the human body in its final granular form and creates a world where grief, wonder, mystery, and the stoic facts of nature leave us with the knowledge that "What matters is that I speak/of heavens and their call /and our response. What matters/is that we can both cry/and cry out loud."

-Tina Schumann, author of Praising the Paradox and Requiem: A Patrimony of Fugue

Amanda Hawkins's When I Say the Bones I Mean the Bones burns through themes of living, dying, of the spiritual, how human beings fit onto and into the earth. Her poems connect Israeli settler colonialism of Palestine with the ongoing desecration of America's Native lands such as Bear Ears National Monument all the while remaining tender and open to transformation as they admit Something about driving the eastern Sierras makes me understand. And this understanding will blossom in your mind, dear reader, long after you put the book down.

-Rajiv Mohabir, author of Whale Aria, Cutlish, The Cowherd's Son, and Antiman

Amanda Hawkins's When I Say the Bones, I Mean the Bones is a book of compassionate imagination. Deftly drawing a line from religious faith to the mortal body to our increasingly fragile environment, Hawkins reckons with our most primal vulnerabilities and, consequently, reckons with the febrile divisions that ought to connect us. From poem to poem, they exude tenderness and the passionate hope that our belief systems need not be bound by institutions or orthodoxies but by witness, love, and a shared sense of possibility, or as Hawkins beautifully observes this hope is entrance.

-Jennifer Chang, author of The History of Anonymity, Some Say the Lark, and An Authentic Life

Amanda Hawkins is a Tin House and Bread Loaf Scholar, three-time Puschart nominee, and recipient of the Editor's Prize for Poetry at The Florida Review. Their work has been published in the Orison Anthology, Orion, Image, Boston Review, Cincinnati Review, The Massachusetts Review, Terrain, Tin House, and Tin House Online. They hold an MA in theological studies from Regent College and an MFA from UC Davis.