Books may be purchased directly from the author. You may order most of these titles at this site by using Cash App or Venmo – contact Ken at khadakhada@gmail.com to use Cash App or Venmo. Or, you may use the secure paypal button and a credit card. Or, you may contact Ken to arrange to pay by check. Some titles may be ordered from the publisher, or from your favorite independent book store, Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
“Ken Hada’s poems in Come Before Winter are exhilarating: richly textured, humming with energy, and deeply felt. Hada finds depths where no one else bothers to look. I read this book twice and I’m just getting started with it.” — Lou Berney
Feral Skies: Selected Poems 2008-2020, offers 60 poems in 70 pages – a neat variety of Ken’s work through the years. Order from https://www.cyberwit.net/authors/ken-hada,
or from https://www.amazon.com/Feral-Skies-Selected-Ken-Hada/dp/8182538572/ref=sr_1_1?crid=11S7AMDQA9IJQ&keywords=ken+hada&qid=1642626801&sprefix=ken+hada%2Cspecialty-aps%2C169&sr=8-1
Hada wins poetry award
Published October 2021 by Turning Plow Press, Contour Feathers was awarded the 2022 Oklahoma Book Award for poetry. This is Ken’s longest work to date, offering 107 poems, balanced in 6 sections: themes of human destiny, mortality, love and loss, family, socio-political, and of course the rhythms of Nature.
Artwork by Sarah A. Hada
“The poems in Ken Hada’s Contour Feathers seem effortless, but they are effortless in the way a lilac flowering is effortless, or goodness in John Lewis is effortless, or the way the work of a nuthatch is effortless. Grounded in vision and rooted in the mystical, Hada’s works are translations of the miraculous all around us. I find myself here in the company of Rilke, Basho, Clifton, Rumi.” – Darrell Bourque, Louisiana Poet Laureate 2007-2011
“When I read Ken Hada’s poems, I’m reminded why we need poetry. Our hearts and souls get little nourishment from the words in our daily lives. We need poetry to remember to look and listen to the world around us. Just read “When I Dream” and you too will know what poetry does and why we need it” – Richard Cooper.
Finalist for the 2021 Oklahoma Book Award.
In Sunlight and Cedar, the themes of Ken Hada’s poetry remain constant to his earlier work. You will find poems of nature, ecology, family, isolation and social justice, with a little moral theology and philosophy thrown in. But what has changed in this collection is Hada’s tone. It’s a subtle change, but what one finds in this collection is a wiser and older poet who has begun to come to terms with life’s disappointments, and thus you meet a poet who can revel evermore deeply in life’s joys, however fleeting and few they are.
This turn in the poet’s mindset is signaled from the get-go with his masterful title poem “Sunlight and Cedar” in which he answers an apparent shortcoming of his work, it’s preoccupation with cigars, sunlight and cedar, by asking, “Is it such a bad thing/ to want to endure as cedar?/ Is it a shortcoming?/ to seek the light of the sun?” Clearly it is not, nor is it a bad thing to play dominoes with your dad, or to go camping with your son, or any of the scenes explored in these poems. So settle in for an evening or two with this fine collection of poems and enjoy the works of a master poet as he tries to remember something beyond words.
–Alan Berecka
“Ken Hada’s Not Quite Pilgrims presents a natural world brimming with promise: there are owls in the trees, trout in the rivers, and wild geese in “feral skies”; there is a “chestnut mare” leaning over the fence that contains her; there is the weighted and meaningful “stillness of stars.” In such a place, the shimmering fish pulled briefly from its cool stream into the bright air serves as confirmation that the humble fisherman belongs, and that we are all given “a moment’s chance to hold beauty.” Though there are shadows in these poems—the shadows of humankind’s hate and destruction, and the shadow of death—the work itself is “undeterred in darkness,” and the light breaks through. It is in the appreciation of simple wonders often taken for granted—birdsong, music, rain, morning coffee, trees, the sky—that “truth begins,” and we can start to find our redemption.” -Chera Hammons, author of The Traveler’s Guide to Bomb City
Finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award: BRING AN EXTRY MULE: (VAC: Purple Flag, 2017). Jonas Zdanys writes: “[Hada] knows, and at every step affirms, that ‘the same stars hang above us all.’ That is the fundamental truth in these remarkable poems, genuine and insightful, that at every turn of the page bring us to smiling recognition or to tears. Hada knows that we all share this great land together, that for many of our fellow citizens an “extry mule” is a matter of necessity and of pride, and that all of us must accept that the commitment to shared purpose and community – across the many horizons at the nation’s great core and both eastward and westward to the oceans that frame us – are what ‘keep an unfair/world from grinding to a halt.’ This is a brilliant book, a literary and cultural treasure”
Persimmon Sunday– December 2015 Chicago: (VAC: Purple Flag 2015) A review by Oklahoma Poet Laureate, Ben Myers, is posted http://vacpoetry.org/persimmon-sunday/
Lamar University Press (November 2013).
Paul Bogard (The End of Night) says “these poems are clear companions in a world to often confused by concrete and steel, information overload and nature deficit-disorders.”
A review is posted at: http://vacpoetry.org/2014/01/15/margaritas-and-redfish/
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A collaborative project with brother Duane Hada, whose plein aire watercolors follow the White River from its mountain source 700 miles to the Mississippi. 90 paintings and 40 ekphrastic poems, plus an historical Introduction by Greg Patterson, The River White has been praised by Dave Whitlock and LeAnne Howe, was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and reviewed in World Literature Today. Order directly from Ken, or Mongrel Empire Press, or Powell’s Books or Indiebound, or Barnes & Noble or Amazon.
Recipient of the 2011 Wrangler Award by the National Western Heritage Museum and Cowboy Hall of Fame, and finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award, Spare Parts, according to Larry Thomas offers “little triumphs necessary to sustain us through the tragedies of our lives.” Four of the poems from this collection have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s nationally syndicated program The Writer’s Almanac. Order from Ken or Mongrel Empire Press, Powell’s Books, Indiebound, Barnes & Noble or Amazon.
17 new poems from Ken and 12 original guitar compositions from son Kenny Hada forms a moving narrative. This enjoyable CD, praised by Tim Tingle for its eloquent, dusty art, offers a concept- album of characters shaped by place. (Contact: khadakhada@gmail.com if interested in cd).
Second edition. First published in 2008, and second edition, 2019, this is Ken’s first full-length collection. The landscape of Oklahoma is prominent. Rilla Askew says, “These richly evocative poems of place and perception are some of the finest I’ve read. If you would know Oklahoma, her seasons, sounds, sights, textures, what lives here in the spirit and the land, read Ken Hada’s Way of the Wind.”