One Strange Country

one strange country

In her debut poetry collection, Russian-American poet Stella Hayes, replaces one strange country with another she calls home, mapping an origin story of identity, exile and loss. In stark and sharp language, Hayes conveys poems of witness, longing and love. With lyrical urgency, Hayes interrogates displacement and belonging, what it means to grow attached to places as much as to people. This collection takes a reader from a child's understanding of family life in the former U.S.S.R., to an understanding of what it means to come of age, marry, and give birth to children in an adopted country. “An exile’s life is planned one day at a time,” Hayes declares in one poem which informs her own experiences, as a daughter, sister, mother, and poet. “One Strange Country is as much a collection of maps as it is a collection of poems.” (Erica Wright) Hayes has embraced what Frank Bidart would call her “radical givens,” those writerly obsessions that we cannot escape.
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Praise for One Strange Country

"Hayes’s restless and searching debut addresses the pain and disorientation of assimilation alongside the comforts of family....emotionally resonant and insightful....This debut provides an honest and moving tribute to the immigrant experience."
-- Publishers Weekly

“Like someone displaced as a child and, after everything, living a perfectly ordinary, loving life, One Strange Country craves an ‘ordinary–– / type of happiness.’ Like family, like the past, ‘An exile’s life is planned out one day at a time.’ And we do, too, in this marvelous debut collection of poems.”
— Ralph Angel, author of the poetry collection, Your Moon

“There is a raw thread of loss—of homeland, of family, of innocence—weaving itself through Stella Hayes’ exquisite and deeply compelling debut collection, One Strange Country. With its restless reckonings and mature power, One Strange Country is a book to hold close and treasure.”
— David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: Selected and New Poems

“One Strange Country is as much a collection of maps as it is a collection of poems. At turns gleeful and elegiac, grateful and defiant, this book considers the state of exile. In “Monolith,” Hayes writes, 'I am in a memory, in the generation I lived among you. / I stand against a world that has no use for paper.' The poet never shies away from her lonely mission, guiding readers through landscapes both seen and unseen.”
— Erica Wright, author of All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned