Saturday Review: “The Courage to Confront What Hurts Us,” a joint feature review by Bell Bridget of Jayme Ringleb’s So Tall It Ends with Heaven (Tin House, 2022) and Han Vanderhart’s What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2022), in NCLR Online Fall 2025.
Both Han Vanderhart’s What Pecan Light and Jayme Ringleb’s So Tall It Ends with Heaven, explore blunt truths and unapproachable situations involving forgiveness and family “as if each poet has taken a magnifying glass and held it up to a multitude of traumas in order to better process and understand their impact,” according to reviewer Bridget Bell. Amid the unpacking and dissection of haunted pasts and forgiving the unforgivable, both poetry collections offer moments of light which, as Bell explains, reminds readers of “the complexity of the human experience.”
The rich imagery that describes the American South in both books places readers into the “sticky dampness so indicative of this region,” Bell notes. This atmosphere serves as an almost perfect metaphor for the attempt to “escape that which we cannot escape,” ultimately leaving readers immersed in a Southern setting while also reflecting on the aches and vulnerability of love.
Read the entire review here. Order What Pecan Light and So Tall It Ends With Heaven from the publishers.
