Crow Funeral, by Kate Hanson Foster
Review by Joe Haward March 2023
Published by Eastover Press, Rochester, Massachusetts
5/5
Sometimes words break you open, connected as they are to the story and person who has uttered them, and somehow, inexplicably, ringing deeply within your own story and personhood; this is how it felt reading Kate Hanson Foster’s Crow Funeral. Each poem within this collection has the capacity to draw your humanity out into the open. The secret things that often remain hidden through shame or fear, given to the world as a gift of dignity, a voice calling out in the wilderness.
Crow Funeral is divided into four parts that act as a breath, a moment to process what has been, and then continue into the raw humanness of what will come.
Hanson Foster bravely and beautifully weaves together pieces that express family life, childhood, love, motherhood, and the torment of postpartum depression and anxiety. At times the text is rich in metaphor and mystery, words dancing with each other as meaning and message are like breath on the back of your neck,
“Cover my flesh in chaos, in fevers,
and fingers. For worse, for worse, scratch
a match on my walls, and burn my name
in flame—set my devils to wind, release
my signature in a strangle of smoke.”
And there are other moments when the reader is confronted with pure and visceral pain, biting wind in your face, especially when giving voice to depression and anxiety,
“No God when I want to jump
from the bedroom window to feel
a pain I can identify—a break
that might scoop me away
from my emergency.”
The theme of prayer, and painful faith, figures throughout Crow Funeral, reflections upon a childhood that involved church, and then an adulthood where God is both the absent king and the fool in the court of life. Hanson Foster speaks as someone who will not hide truth—her truth, and the truth of many women—behind a veil of platitudes or sentimentality. There is pain that must be confronted, reality that must be witnessed to, and myths that must be exposed.
Nietzsche once said, “What makes Heroic? — To face simultaneously one’s greatest suffering and one’s highest hope.” Crow Funeral reads as heroic. It is the heroism of mother, as suffering and hope are bound together in this identity and purpose. To quote Nietzsche again, this book is “the rejoicing of strength that is returning, of a reawakened faith in a tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of seas that are open again, of goals that are permitted again, believed again.” There is pain here, and there is hope.
In Crow Funeral, Kate Hanson Foster has created a storytelling masterclass, using poetry to break open the human heart, and give us the story(ies) we need to hear.