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Lola Haskins

Poet. Artist. Human Being.

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I’m excited to announce the arrival of Like Zeros, Like Pearls, a collection of poems about insects, every story in which is certifiably true. You can pre-order it here:

https://charlottelit.configio.com/pearls 

or come to the local launch at Tower Road Library, March 30 at 2pm and have a signed copy.


The poems in Lola Haskins’ newest collection, Homelight (Charlotte Lit Press 2023), are equally elegant and eloquent in their graceful blend of theme, imagery, and language.“

Claire Hamner-Matturro, Southern literary review

I’m thrilled to announce that Homelight has won the Southern Literary Review 2024 Poetry Book of the Year.



ORDER HOMELIGHT >>

  • To Play Pianissimo

    Does not mean silence,
    the absence of moon in the day sky
    for example

    Does not mean barely to speak,
    the way a child's whisper
    makes only warm air
    on his mother's right ear.

    To play pianissimo
    is to carry sweet words
    to the old woman in the last dark row
    who cannot hear anything else,
    and to lay them across her lap like a shawl.

    (from Forty-Four Ambitions for the Piano, reprinted in Desire Lines)

  • Fortissimo

    To play fortissimo
    hold something back.

    It is what the father does not say
    that turns the son.

    The fact that the summit cannot be seen
    that drives the climber on.

    Consider the graceless ones:
    the painter who adds one more brush stroke.

    the poet of least resistance
    who writes past the end of his poem.

  • Django

    In the middle of the night he arrives
    with his pillow.
    He climbs between us
    and slowly his shivers die.

    He heard
    the leaves move in the yard, a step
    at a time.

    This is what we live for,
    you and I, this private moment when
    he settles into our breathing, and
    we are three birds on one deep swell,
    a lifetime from any land we knew.

  • The Sandhill Cranes

    The blue air fills with cries.
    The cranes are streams, rivers.
    They danced on the night prairie,
    leapt at each other, quivering.

    The long bones of sandhill cranes
    know their next pond. Not us.
    When something is too beautiful,
    we do not have the grace to leave.

    (The Grace to Leave)


Lola Haskins lives in Gainesville, Florida and Skipton, Yorkshire. Her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, London Magazine, The New York Quarterly, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle and elsewhere, as well as having been broadcast on NPR and BBC radio. She has published fourteen collections of poems, a poetry advice book and a non-fiction book about fifteen Florida cemeteries.

Ms. Haskins has been awarded three book prizes, two NEA fellowships, four Florida Cultural Affairs fellowships,the Emily Dickinson/Writer Magazine award from Poetry Society of America, and several prizes for narrative poetry. She retired from teaching Computer Science at the University of Florida in 2005 and served from then until 2015 on the faculty of Rainier Writers Workshop.

Learn more about Ms. Haskins, buy her books, see what she’s reading, and enjoy samples of her work.

© Lola Haskins 2023

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