‘Garden State’ Writer John Hennessy ’87 Recommends Poetry
John Hennessy ’87 is an author, poet, and English professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Drawing on his studies of English at Princeton, Hennessy teaches courses ranging from poetry to nonfiction literature. He has published three collections of poetry, most recently Exit Garden State, a volume deeply inspired by his New Jersey upbringing.
In another life, I join the hierophants
of New Jersey, drink petrochemical winds
swirling across Route One, a new Delphi,
speak their ethylene mysteries.
— Hennessy, “In Another Life” Volume 65, Issue 1 (Spring 2024)
Hennessy’s fervor for New Jersey made him an obvious choice for PAW’s Three Books, and his recommendations show all the depth expected of one with the ability to romanticize the Garden State. PAW asked Hennessy to recommend three books of poetry for readers, and he chose these:
By Anna Malihon (translated by Olena Jennings)
Anna Malihon’s poems about life during wartime are harrowing, emotionally devastating, yet full of calm ironies: Ukraine’s evacuated and bombed cities, “from which children come instead of letters/ come in long heavy envelopes” — are now “so deserted there’s no one to harm you.”
Malihon is somehow always intimate — these poems manage to feel personal — even while documenting the war in a circumspect manner, from the point of view of a variety of personae. One disembodied voice even declares to a dog nosing through the trenches, “People are death to people, don’t get used to them.” Yet these poems remain full of vividly evoked moments of family life and joyful time spent with lovers, even if so much has been left behind, “like a ransom paid/ for an incredibly fortunate life.”
Presented in Olena Jennings’ seamless translation, Girl with a Bullet is one of the most important books of the year for those with an interest in the fate of Ukraine, a gift to Anglophone readers.
By Mosab Abu Toha
Palestinian poet, essayist, and founder of the Edward Said ’57 Library, Mosab Abu Toha writes in English, and his new collection, Forest of Noise, has drawn praise from all over the world, especially for its evocation of family life that remains close-knit despite hardships which should challenge the borders of our imagination: “I’ve personally lost three friends to war,/ a city to darkness, and a language to fear./ …But of all things,/ losing the only photo of my grandfather/ under the rubble of my house/ was a real disaster.”
Unfortunately, the book — which vivifies life in Gaza during “peace” and wartime and does so, like Anna Malihon’s Girl with a Bullet, through the use of various voices and personae — has also earned Abu Toha threats to his safety, and he has stopped making public appearances in the U.S. Recently a group of writers and public figures from here and abroad gathered at Revolution Books in Harlem to read from Forest of Noise. Among Abu Toha’s staunch supporters is New Yorker editor David Remnick ’81, who published several of the poems included here as well as Abu Toha’s 2025 Pulitzer-Prize winning essays.
By Virginia Konchan
For over a decade, and over the course of nine books, Virginia Konchan has been building one of the strongest bodies of work in contemporary American poetry, and this is especially evidenced by her new collection, Requiem. The book is both meditation on and intellectual documentation of Konchan’s long period nursing her mother through hospice care; she deftly engages scripture, Andrea Dworkin, Nietzsche, Bruno Latour, Henri Bergson, Kant, Parmenides, Zeno, and many others — and most of these within a single poem. While her mother lies dying from a brain tumor, her father begins his own descent into dementia, and Konchan approaches both parents’ suffering through compassion and insight in poems that are simultaneously ironic, full of wordplay and wit, stunning theological insights, dazzling philosophical explorations, and deadly serious:
I’m at an age where everyone around me is dying.
I’m at an age when the recited script isn’t enough.
Glory be to god for logjams, the antediluvian dark,
for being a supply of goodness outpacing demand.
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