Poetry at Literati: Kristen Tracy: Half-Hazard

Literati is so excited to welcome poet Kristen Tracy who will be reading from her new collection Half-Hazard.

About Half-Hazard:
Half-Hazard is the Winner of the Emily Dickinson First Book Award from the Poetry Foundation for a debut by an American poet over forty.

Half-Hazard is a book of near misses, would-be tragedies, and luck. As Kristen Tracy writes in the title poem, “Dangers here. Perils there. It’ll go how it goes.” The collection follows her wide curiosity, from growing up in a small Mormon farming community to her exodus into the forbidden world, where she finds snakes, car accidents, adulterers, meteors, and death-marked mice. These wry, observant narratives are accompanied by a ringing lyricism, and Tracy’s knack for noticing what’s so funny about trouble and her natural impulse to want to put all the broken things back together. Full of wrong turns, false loves, quashed beliefs, and a menagerie of animals, Half-Hazard introduces a vibrant new voice in American poetry, one of resilience, faith, and joy.

Kristen Tracy is a poet and the acclaimed author of more than a dozen novels for young readers. Her poems have been published in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and The Threepenny Review, among other magazines. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son