Image Description: Front cover of View from True North with black background and a stretched torso.

About View from True North: A poetry collection that traces a journey through grief, love, illness, and survival, grounded firmly in place and lived experience. Henning writes with clarity and emotional precision about family relationships, caregiving, and the complicated inheritance of trauma, often returning to the landscapes of the Midwest as a stabilizing yet fragile compass point. The poems balance vulnerability with restraint, revealing how moments of loss and desire shape identity over time.

Praise for View from True North:

"Sara Henning's poems search through the past and present, never turning an eye from the pain of loss: a grandfather's death and a father's suicide. Both family portrait and mirror, each poem is rendered with lyrical precision and quiet reverie as they present a scarred life, the wounds healing but not yet closed. The speaker here claims to be the 'heiress of disaster, and though much of her inheritance is loss, she shapes it, poem by poem, into strength." - Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men

"Henning writes in the proud tradition of such contemporary masters as James Wright, Lorine Niedecker, and Stanley Plumly. Like them, she understands that the task of relating family history is sometimes indistinguishable from lamentation. Also like them, she situates her poems in the hardscrabble precincts of the rural Midwest, locales upon which she bestows a troubled grace-thanks to her formal elegance, her startling metaphors, and her dexterous command of narrative. View from True North is a grave and bracing debut, a collection of unusual promise." - David Wojahn, author of For the Scribe

"The impeccable crafting, formal mastery, and literary intelligence of View from True
North all function as a brave counterbalance to the harrowing material at its core. What shores up the valor of this book's acute witnessing gaze is its language-lush, lustrous, hammered into archetype. Henning's ravishing music is in revolt against the trauma of the book's narrative, just as her sonnet sequences provide the ballast of history, of virtuosity. Sara Henning, a 'trickster,' "'an heiress of disaster, has composed a radical masterpiece." -Diane Suess, author of Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

About the Author: Sara Henning is the author of one other poetry book, A Sweeter Water. Her poems have appeared in Quarterly West, Witness, Passages North, Rhino, Meridian, and Cincinnati Review. In 2015 she won the Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize. She is a visiting assistant professor of English and creative writing at Stephen F. Austin State University.