David Thacker introduces his new poetry collection, Some Hard Stars (Signature Books), and discusses lyric poetry.
When my high school students start our poetry unit there are always a chorus of groans and a few quiet cheers. In my early years as a teacher, I tried to overwhelm the discontent with my own unbridled enthusiasm, which worked after a fashion, especially if I happened to tear up while reading a favorite poem (there’s nothing like adult vulnerability to grab teenage attention). I’ve long since learned where the groans come from: past bad experiences with an art form they haven’t yet learned how to engage with meaningfully (with an emphasis on yet).
I now begin any poetry unit something like this instead, which is also how I want to start this post: Let me tell you why I love lyric poetry and what a poem is to me.
A lyric poem is a psychological and emotional portrait in a particular moment. That’s the definition that works for me. When we read a poem, we are paying utmost attention to how a unique individual is experiencing, navigating, or trying to make sense of something in their life. And we care deeply about why they want to say what they say. This makes a lyric poem quite different from most things we read because it isn’t a chronological sequence that we care most about but an individual in one moment.
A book of lyric poetry, then, with its portraits arranged in an intentional order, one snapshot—one reckoned-with moment—after another, is a portrait of a way of being a human in the world—not a story, but a lived-in reality. Whenever I pick up a new book of lyric poetry, I pick up the possibility of encountering another way a human is experiencing being human. That’s terribly exciting.
My first poetry collection, Some Hard Stars, is assembled from poems I’ve written over more than a decade, and it begins with the injunction from The Book of Mormon to “remember the captivity of thy fathers” (Mosiah 27:16). I love this commandment. It frees me from the pride of the present and focuses me on the interconnectedness of the human family from past to future. It’s a call to use the past and all that I’ve inherited to change myself and to hope for my children to do the same—to recognize the ways that their father and mother were held captive in ways we didn’t realize and to revise and change accordingly. Some Hard Stars is an attempt to create a kind of record of the lifelong process of my remembering and the accompanying working through to a new self, especially in my relationships with others. The scripture is an injunction for me but also permission for my children, when they need it, to embrace their own process of change without fear of disloyalty to their parents. This is a gift my parents, in their radical, loving transparency, continue to give to me.
What kinds of captivity does the book reckon with? I try to go as wide as possible as honestly as possible. For instance, one strain is implied in the title, which comes from Sylvia Plath, that troubling breaker of important taboos, especially around mental illness. And mental illness is indeed a central reality affecting the way of being in this book—but so are the miracles of slow healing and increasing freedom despite mental illness. Prejudice and racism are inevitable in past and current American life, and they are strains here, too, but so are simple heroisms and kindnesses. Fear and the captivity of not being willing to reckon with hard things—that’s another strain. And there are, of course, more.
I like the metaphor of strains instead of something like threads because it reminds me of DNA or the ecological complexity that makes up a life. There’s inevitably grief here and the dissonance of competing truths and unanswered questions. There’s also the wonder of discovery through vulnerability.
Perhaps the thickest strain running throughout Some Hard Stars is false assumptions about masculinity as a husband and as a father, and the joys on the other side of letting such encumbrances go. And that’s where I’d like to end—with a poem about joy. Joy is required. It is essential. It is paramount. Without it we fall into another insidious captivity (for instance defaulting to cynicism). Here’s a poem that demonstrates moving from one kind of captivity to a joy that swallows it up in gratitude and wonder, which is, to me, the most dumbfounding aspect of the miracle of revision and change:
The River Conception’s Mouth
Under her linea nigra the abdominals have parted,
and the couple has finally neared the river’s estuary,
a lowland of swirling impatience and rising pain.
Anxious to be done, to enter the full current
and the pushing through, he realizes his wife is a center
of commerce, has always been her own
cottage industry, while he, roamer and solicitor,
is simply a surplus warehouse. The notion mutes
the world. Beside him, propped in her hospital bed,
awaiting the next contraction, a labor force, an executive,
a nearly complete economy watches over
her manufacturing: a girl, another mortal
consortium. He feels a swell press his conscience.
Is he objectifying his wife? His daughter
not even born? One day, he knows, he’ll reckon
his guilt further, but here, in the mish-mash
that he is, the man wants to tell you, daughter, how
we entered the river’s mouth, your mother bearing
down on the rudder against the sudden, constantly
choppy water as she also heaved the oars,
while your father, mere passenger, newly conscious
powerless consort, whooped, cheered. Doubled-up,
a mechanical wail grinding from her throat,
your mother crowned you with the jeweled halo
of herself—a halo that tore so that your face,
messy with vernix, could puncture the air.
[originally published in BYU Studies]
David Thacker is the author of Some Hard Stars (2026, Signature Books), and his poems have appeared in Image, The Kenyon Review, Orion, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of the Creative Writing Award from the Western Literature Association, a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and he was selected by Tracy K. Smith for Best New Poets. He received his MFA from The University of Idaho, his PhD from Florida State University, and he teaches at The Ethel Walker School, where he chairs the English Department, runs the Visiting Writer Seminar, and is the Director of Community Partnerships (a relationships-based service program). Visit him at davidthackerwriter.com