What do you think?
Rate this book
Strange Hymn: Poems
“I’ll tell you everything I know. Though there might not be much to tell,” confesses the speaker in Strange Hymn by Carlene Kucharczyk, in a meticulously crafted lyrical journey exploring morality and humanity. The poems here grapple with understanding physical “I wanted / to know once and definitively our animal bodies / were not all we were. It is shameful to be this fragile.” They also engage with the more abstract slipping away of memory and “Since I was born, I have been forgetting. Forgetting what I have wanted to remember.” Kucharczyk’s insightful poems blur the lines between history and myth, love and grief, song and silence.
Caught between lamenting the passage of time and rejoicing in small beauties, she writes, “I tell you, I wish we could stay here longer / in this hotel of lost grandeur, this palace of interesting disarray, / and stay here with these pieces of the impersonal past / that have somehow not yet outlasted their small lights.” Each moment reflects on our ephemeral lives from musings on art and nature to reflections on the self, asking “Is a mirror a sort of glass house? / And, is there a way to see ourselves besides through the glass?”
As readers traverse this collection, they learn how the body sings, the many iterations of Mary, what sirens truly think of Odysseus, how a Morning Glory unfurls, and lessons in orthodontics, but most importantly, how to live with absence. Kucharczyk is a master of manipulating time and space through her dynamic use of form, creating a narrative that begs, “After I’m gone, don’t bury my body— / Burn it, and turn it into song.”
Caught between lamenting the passage of time and rejoicing in small beauties, she writes, “I tell you, I wish we could stay here longer / in this hotel of lost grandeur, this palace of interesting disarray, / and stay here with these pieces of the impersonal past / that have somehow not yet outlasted their small lights.” Each moment reflects on our ephemeral lives from musings on art and nature to reflections on the self, asking “Is a mirror a sort of glass house? / And, is there a way to see ourselves besides through the glass?”
As readers traverse this collection, they learn how the body sings, the many iterations of Mary, what sirens truly think of Odysseus, how a Morning Glory unfurls, and lessons in orthodontics, but most importantly, how to live with absence. Kucharczyk is a master of manipulating time and space through her dynamic use of form, creating a narrative that begs, “After I’m gone, don’t bury my body— / Burn it, and turn it into song.”
- GenresPoetry
87 pages, Paperback
Published April 4, 2025
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 5, 2025
Reading Carlene Kucharczyk’s debut Strange Hymn feels like following the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole into a world that is both familiar and strange. These poems force us to reexamine our own ideas about what it means to exist and why. Kucharczyk pushes language to the edge of what it can do, making it leap and wind through the pages, unrestrained. It is playful and full of whimsy while hurling itself toward larger and darker truths. This is a voice that insists on singing into the darkness by reaching into the past, drawing wisdom from poets, philosophers, artists, and loved ones who have gone before. It challenges myth and questions religion. It is fierce and tender, a joy and an offering.
June 13, 2025
This is a wild debut, which comes out of left field to play with space on the page, form,line length, and narrative style, and manages to bring it all together in a cohesive, meaningful way.
Opener “church” (the spacing is too unusual to adequately convey on GR) is channeling Emily Dickinson (UMass Press, near Amherst College where ED briefly studied, published Strange Hymns—mere coincidence or cosmic spiderweb?) with its spacing, minimalism, parentheses, and closing “—“, which is both a lovely not-ending to a poem that urges the reader to live and a beautiful bridge into the subsequent collection.
I love the humor that Kucharczyk scatters throughout (On Beholding the Beloved’s Rotting Body, for example), but we also get anger: “It is shameful to be this fragile,” we read at the end of October Snow and the funeral it describes. That hit hard for me. It is shameful, it is hard to look our fragility straight in the face.
Mary, as well as Self Portrait Through Glass, lean more into prose/prose poetry, and bring the sparks that those forms can strike.
Closer [be blown back] also ends with a “—“, which lets go of our hand after encouraging us to “Give / both hands to the birds,” which also feels very Dickinsonian.
This collection feels very intimate, full of small rooms, faces close to each other, quiet mornings and silent nights, but it reaches out beyond those specific moments into our wider world. I think that’s one of art’s most beautiful aspects, how the small becomes transcendent, and Kucharczyk trusts the power of her words and images to make that jump. Nothing feels forced, nothing feels less than earnest, no one must be impressed, and that is what leaves a bigger footprint.
“with love / there is no substitute / for time” ([you were in the world]), and love feels like the only option after you spend time with this collection.
Opener “church” (the spacing is too unusual to adequately convey on GR) is channeling Emily Dickinson (UMass Press, near Amherst College where ED briefly studied, published Strange Hymns—mere coincidence or cosmic spiderweb?) with its spacing, minimalism, parentheses, and closing “—“, which is both a lovely not-ending to a poem that urges the reader to live and a beautiful bridge into the subsequent collection.
I love the humor that Kucharczyk scatters throughout (On Beholding the Beloved’s Rotting Body, for example), but we also get anger: “It is shameful to be this fragile,” we read at the end of October Snow and the funeral it describes. That hit hard for me. It is shameful, it is hard to look our fragility straight in the face.
Mary, as well as Self Portrait Through Glass, lean more into prose/prose poetry, and bring the sparks that those forms can strike.
Closer [be blown back] also ends with a “—“, which lets go of our hand after encouraging us to “Give / both hands to the birds,” which also feels very Dickinsonian.
This collection feels very intimate, full of small rooms, faces close to each other, quiet mornings and silent nights, but it reaches out beyond those specific moments into our wider world. I think that’s one of art’s most beautiful aspects, how the small becomes transcendent, and Kucharczyk trusts the power of her words and images to make that jump. Nothing feels forced, nothing feels less than earnest, no one must be impressed, and that is what leaves a bigger footprint.
“with love / there is no substitute / for time” ([you were in the world]), and love feels like the only option after you spend time with this collection.
Read
November 17, 2025A strong debut. These poems are written with wit and insight, and intelligence. I was reminded at times of my favorite poems by Szymborska.
I especially liked, In Medias Res, On Beholding the Beloved’s Rotting Body, and the crow.
I especially liked, In Medias Res, On Beholding the Beloved’s Rotting Body, and the crow.
May 6, 2025
Love this poignant book of poetry, beautiful book.
Read
October 6, 2025I loved this collection
May 11, 2026
Brilliant collection that builds on the work of Dickinson and Ashbery to reckon with the present. Loved the mix of verse and "essay-poem." "In Medias Res" floored me.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews