HALF MOON WAKING https://ift.tt/Fdng3YI

Hunziker’s writings, which include haiku, free verse, essays, and a few short stories, are centered on the theme of a woman’s passage through motherhood, from the pain and hope of pregnancy to bone-deep postpartum soreness and exhaustion, along with the helpless anxiety of vigils through her kids’ bouts with asthma and pneumonia, her pride as their minds awake to the world, miscellaneous vignettes (such as the desperate quest for a bathroom when she takes her toddlers on an outing near their snowy Minnesota home), and the plangent grief of a miscarriage. Hunziker explores other subjects as well: the hush of a deep snowfall, skittish girlhood encounters with boys, and a dayslong, rain-soaked trek over a mountain in West Papua, Indonesia, that teaches the narrator the strength of endurance without hope. Many of the essays explore her Christian faith in ardent, hymnlike prose: “In the broken, humble hearts, in the glass of water shared in Jesus’ name, within our souls when we invite Jesus to come near and be in charge of us, in the cold or hungry bodies and souls of homeless people—God dwells on earth, too.” Hunziker’s poetry especially stands out for its vivid specificity that imbues familiar objects with emotional significance, whether describing the heartache of a failed pregnancy—“We saw the positive pregnancy test! / Ultrasound bared a glad heartbeat. / Due date would have been Christmas Day. / Then, then, then, I bled; / blood of the dying, but me, I lost.” Hunziker’s beguiling illustrations ably complement the text by transforming photographs—a still forest lake; a girl hugging her grandmother—into faint, ghostly, graphic images that display life as through a veil of mist.

from Kirkus Reviews https://ift.tt/UwTYNWE