Road Trip

Mary Stone Hanley's debut collection of poems, Road Trip, is a journey at the same time physical, historical, and spiritual. While it travels through the realms of childhood and approaching death, it also plots the way along the road from Civil Rights, to the Black Arts Movement, to avant-garde jazz of the 1960s, and the Black Lives Matter movement of contemporary times. In a stirring section essential to the message of her poetry, the author "translates" John Coltrane's Love Supreme into verse, culminating with a resounding "Thank you, God," spoken in unison by the jazz great and the poet herself. As her passing approaches, the speaker of these poems doesn't flinch at endings: but her affirmations move like her poetry toward openings and possibility. "No matter how the dream may go," she writes in the final poem, "Dialectically Speaking," "there is no end/ no last." Road Trip is a journey that disappears into the vanishing point, recognizing along the way that past, future and even existence itself is defined by who is looking and what one chooses to acknowledge. With a clear eye and with the poise and cadence of a master, Mary Stone Hanley guides us to the trail's end, where witness and compassion become the measure of a life.