Then Winter

by Chloe Honum

Editors’ Selection from the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition

Then Winter traces one speaker’s journey in a psychiatric treatment facility. Faced with the threat of a loss of voice, a silence that seeks to bury her, she turns often to the natural world beyond the facility’s windows. The trees, the rain, the birds—these commonplace things become tethering forces of primal, hope-giving importance. As she forms bonds with her fellow patients, some of whom become her unlikely confidants and friends, she discovers the sustaining power of connection and hope.

“On the surface, Chloe Honum’s chapbook, Then Winter, is a powerfully quiet meditation on a speaker’s experiences at a psychiatric ward. But the book is really about the power of nature, nature as ‘conqueror’ in all of its beauty—Honum’s unromantic nature is the prism in which the speaker refracts her life, it’s a way for the speaker to parse or re-angle pain. Honum’s poems and voice are steely, unforgettable, and full of treasures. And her gifts are immensely palpable.”

—Victoria Chang, author of The Boss

“A fly dying in a fluorescent light fixture as snow silences the outside world . . . these poems name an extreme moment with eerie delicacy, so that we are inside it.”

—Nick Flynn, author of The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands

“‘Hope is anything/That travels in big leaps,’ writes Chloe Honum.  Her singular chapbook leads us down the fluorescent corridors of mental hospitals, adding grace notes to the world Lowell memorialized.  For quite some time it has felt like mental house poems left us with only Sexton putting on her fur coat in her closed garage with the car turned on.  Yet here, hope lunges at us, as if Dickinson had decided to pole-vault out of her window.  Honum takes a big leap.  What pleasure to witness.”

—Spencer Reece, author of The Clerk’s Tale

Read a sample poem:

On the Stairs Outside the Psychiatric Ward

I stand with the boy with the twisted body
while the smoke from his cigarette signs its slow signature.
He leans on his cane and the cane shakes.
It is late afternoon, almost dark.

We are day patients and soon will go home.
The boy says, I got into some trouble in Texas,
which is so far away it doesn’t seem to exist,
not with what’s going on now.

All around us autumn is throwing
gold and crimson leaves into the street
while starlings are holding tight on a telephone wire,
heads tucked in the cold. And the boy

and the Vietnam vet, who has just joined us,
and I are looking up with yearning, as though
we could solve that string of bird and sky arithmetic
and know the ages of our souls.

 

originally published in Harvard Review Online

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