Broken Hallelujah, a Collection of Poems, by Cyn Kitchen
By - Leah Maines, Editor Finishing Line Press
Broken Hallelujah is a prairie-rooted meditation on grief, faith, motherhood, and the stubborn persistence of wonder. Set amid wind-scoured fields, gravel roads, critters, storms, and the ordinary domestic rhythms of life, these poems bear witness to an existence shaped by loss without surrendering to despair. Cyn Kitchen writes from the tension between belief and doubt, where praise arrives cracked, hesitant, and hard-won, and where attention itself becomes a kind of prayer. With language that is sensuous, precise, and unsentimental, the collection moves through solitude, loss and memory while remaining fiercely alive to the small, luminous moments that insist on meaning. Shot through with hope, these poems do not resolve the ache at their center; they stand in it, listening, watching, and singing anyway.
"The best writers are keen observers and in Broken Hallelujah Cyn Kitchen shows how closely she watches the world and then articulates the holiness she finds in everyday life. She witnesses the miraculous and reports to us about it in poems that make this collection feel like the prayer book–and the balm–I need right now, never sentimental but always tender, refusing to look away from the deepest despair even as it finds light in the darkness." –Silas House, ’24-’25 Poet Laureate of Kentucky, NY Times bestselling author of Lark Ascending and more.
“…it’s a prayer and an acknowledgment of the fleeting nature of life, and I love how those feelings of both reverence and frustration coexist. It’s a collection that breathes with rural resonance, sincerity, complexity, and a powerful sense of vulnerability.” –Phillip Shabazz, poet and teacher author of Flames o Fire, When the Grass was Blue and more.
"From her window the poet sees a clear view of the open prairie, and there she watches for signs of god. In her ardent new collection, Cyn Kitchen explores edges between day and night, spirit and flesh, now and never. These stunning, tender poems are meditations on the holy, moments of salve, miraculous things. They recognize nature as a portal into the divine. Broken Hallelujah is transcendent, a golden light flickering from a farmhouse across the prairie that shows us we are not alone."—Janisse Ray, author of A House of Branches and Red Lanterns
Cyn Kitchen is professor and chair of English at Knox College where she teaches literature and creative writing. She is the author of Ten Tongues, a collection of short stories. Cyn's essays and poems appear in American Writer's Review, Poetry South, Poetry Quarterly, Cutleaf and Appalachian Review. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been short listed for The Raymond Carver Short Story Award, The storySouth Million Writers Award, and The Best of the Web. A lifelong resident of Knox County, Illinois, Cyn lives in the country near Maquon on a slab of land at the border of trees and prairie where she finds solace in the dirt, the creeks and among the creatures she shares space with including four cats, two dogs and a small flock of chickens. Broken Hallelujah is her first book of poems.