Not Xanadu by Cathryn Hankla

In “Kubla Khan,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge began with the lines, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ A stately pleasure dome decree.” Evidently, Hankla’s title means that she is writing this, her eleventh poetry collection, somewhere other than a stately pleasure dome. As we read these poems, we can assess whether her pleasure dome simply lacks being stately or her stately dome is not sufficiently pleasurable or whether her environs lack both. Born and raised in Richlands, Virginia, at the edge of the coal fields where her mother was the town librarian, Hankla has enjoyed a four-decade career teaching at Hollins University in Roanoke where she makes her home. She is also the author of four books of fiction and a memoir that focuses on the idea of finding and losing a home. "The poems in Cathryn Hankla's Not Xanadu are clear-eyed and sharp-tongued, vulnerable, unabashed, and prescient. To live in our moment, they suggest, we'd best be alert to absurdity as well as beauty, and hold close moments of