The Traveler's Guide to Bomb City

Amarillo, Texas, to many of those who pass through on their way to the "postcard" mountain scenery of northern New Mexico and Colorado, is the flattest and ugliest place they have ever seen. If, however, they were blessed with the eyes and heightened sensibilities of Chera Hammons, they would be awakened to a world of endless beauty and mystery, a world which captivated "literally" for over a year and "spiritually" for a lifetime none other than the major American artist, Georgia O'Keeffe. Hammons's meticulously crafted poems peel away the layers of the ostensible "otherness" of the natural world, revealing its kernels of mystical profundity to the wide-eyed astonishment of the reader. From grackles to abandoned puppies, tornadoes to tumbleweeds, raptors to horses, bomb manufacturing to sparrows, and human epiphanies to heartbreak, Hammons demonstrates time and time again, with consummate poetic skill, that she "learned how to wring beauty / from anything she could." -Larry D. Thomas, Member, Texas Institute of Letters, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate