Stella Fridman Hayes's second poetry collection, Father Elegies draws from an impressive range of literary forms, from familiar couplets and tercets to erasure, blackout poems, and hybrid prose. While stylistically dexterous and technically agile, Hayes' work is unified by its deep and moving engagement with the poetics of alterity. What does it mean to be othered by and through language? How does one reconcile a self and a sociocultural landscape that are at odds? And a self and a genealogy that are to some extent opposed? As the book unfolds, Hayes considers the role of legacy-from familial history to the inheritances of literature, art, and culture-in shaping the self, offering a fraught origin story that ultimately transcends the personal. Indeed, Hayes effortlessly situates this narrative within the context of war, necessary social justice movements, and global upheaval in poems that are as gorgeously rendered as they are timely.
