In her debut poetry collection One Strange Country, Russian-American poet Stella Hayes, replaces one strange country with another she calls home, mapping an origin story of identity, exile and loss. In stark and sharp language, Hayes conveys poems of witness, longing and love. With lyrical urgency, Hayes interrogates displacement and belonging, what it means to grow attached to places as much as to people. This collection takes a reader from a child's understanding of family life in the former U.S.S.R., to an understanding of what it means to come of age, marry, and give birth to children in an adopted country. "An exile's life is planned one day at a time," Hayes declares in one poem which informs her own experiences, as a daughter, sister, mother, and poet. "One Strange Country is as much a collection of maps as it is a collection of poems." (Erica Wright) Hayes has embraced what Frank Bidart would call her "radical givens," those writerly obsessions that we cannot escape.

Author: Stella Hayes
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: What Books Press
Published: 11/01/2020
Pages: 92
Weight: 0.32lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.22d
ISBN: 9780988924895


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 12/21/2020

About the Author
Hayes, Stella: - One Strange Country is Stella Hayes's first poetry collection. She grew up in an agricultural town outside of Kiev, Ukraine and Los Angeles. Hayes earned a creative writing degree at University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in Prelude, The Indianapolis Review and Spillway, among others. She lives in Larchmont, N.Y., with her husband, writer Dade Hayes, and children, Margot and Finley.