- Featured Work -
"At first, we didn’t say anything. We just gripped each other’s hands like we were clinging to life. On the street corner, Kai stumbled a bit, grabbed onto our neighbor’s stone retaining wall. He looked at the November sky, the nearly bare trees, the dog."
"That's when I realized a tattoo is a scar. The wound--and its permanence--is freely chosen."
"In my husband’s dream about a month before he died, he saw me seated at a table in a funky bookstore, a steaming mug of tea and a stack of books waiting to be signed."
"What’s your name? Your birthday? And today’s date? each nurse asks him every few hours. Michael always gets the first two questions correct, but not the third."
"'I ain't givin' it to you,' my grandfather would say. 'You've got to earn it.' According to my father, on the day he was finally able to outplay his father, 'he was happier than I was.'"
"Almost absently, he’d flick open the top, thumb the wheel, close the lid on the flame. Stare at it as if he didn’t see it."
"The more I wrote, the more I realized it was a story worth telling for others, not just myself and our children."
Click through the gallery to see more of Helene's work.
- Reviews and Awards -
"Helene doesn't pull any punches...her writing is transcendent and so engaging."
Joelle Frasier, author of The Territory of Men
"A virtuoso writer...nothing here does not in some way relate, associatively or by sound or by symbolic resemblance."
Tony Hoagland, recipient of the James Laughlin Award
"A poet with both narrative and lyric gifts. [Kiser's work] is whole and vivid and full of lucid human business of the heart and mind."
Thomas Lux, recipient of the Kingsley-Tufts Award
“The playfulness, the comic leaking in makes the work more serious, in the real scale of life itself.”
Marianne Boruch, author of The Little Death of Self
“Her writing has exceptional range, both stylistically and thematically….moving from the intensely personal to universal relevance with seamless transitions.”
Jim Peterson, author of Paper Crown
“Helene is smart, not just in the book sense, but street smart as well….a terrific sense of humor and wildly inventive.”
Patricia Henley, author of Hummingbird House
“Wonderfully, vividly rendered…I’ll never forget these sentences.”
Deborah Way, writer and editor of The Keepthings
“Helene’s sense of meaning is sophisticated and astute.”
Joan Aleshire, author of Days of Our Lives
“A free associative experience with room for argument, ambiguity, and play.”
Eleanor Wilner, former editor, The American Poetry Review
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Allan Ginsberg Poetry Award, the Poetry Center
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Atlanta Review Prize
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Conduit Prize
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Marlboro Review Prize
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Midwest Poetry Review Choice Award
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Paumanok Poetry Award
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The Pushcart Prize nominee 2018, 2003
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Writer's Digest Writing Awards