Birthmark

In this notable debut collection, Christina Hennemann charts the complex terrain of growing up, becoming, and belonging. Her keen ecological awareness infuses the work with vivid landscapes from both her German roots and Irish home. With unflinching honesty and lyrical precision, she explores the intersections of gender, class, and sexuality against the backdrop of intergenerational trauma. She weaves personal history with ancient mythologies and archetypes into poems with a vatic and haunting nature. Characteristic of her poems is her playful approach to bilingualism, while her feminist-psychoanalytic lens brings sharp focus to the personal and political dimensions of growing up in a dysfunctional family amid global upheaval. "Christina Hennemann presents here a collection densely interwoven with meaning and experience. She percolates childhood, girlhood, womanhood through a personal mythology inventive and original; with language cadent, elegant and sonically sparkling." -Patrick Cotter 'Christina Hennemann's Birthmark pulses with warmth and daring. These poems draw us into a mother's arms - an embrace of nostalgia and vulnerability - while exploring the female body through folklore, paintings, and pop culture. Balancing the power and threat within womanhood, this book is part mirror, part blade - a knife passed down through generations.' -Sophie Dumont 'The title of Christina Hennemann's debut poetry volume, fiercely asserting her presence in the physical world and in the poetry world, comes from a poem in which male and female appear simultaneously as lovers and enemies tearing into each other in unambiguously animal terms. This remarkable book is charged throughout with pulsing, tactile language; with feral, meaty, intense and intensely sexual poems, in which bodily, linguistic and geographical entities strive towards merging. At times formally adventurous, this is material that grapples with and threatens to break free from the received formalities of conventional poetry. While there's demonstrable love of language and its possibilities and effects beyond the narrativistic, formal and procedural tensions burst from the page, seeking liberation from its limits.' -Christodoulos Makris