In What Happens readers will find two separate books by poet Hilda Raz, originally published as The Bone Dish and What Is Good, brought together for the first time as the author intended. These musically wrought and emotionally candid poems explore the pleasure and pain of family relationships, the complicated joy of being a woman, and the unconventional beauty of the Great Plains. Readers will meet Raz’s son, Aaron, and find themselves drawn to fundamental questions about identity and belonging.

Hilda Raz, Luschei Professor and editor of Prairie Schooner, is a professor of English and women’s and gender studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and the author of the poetry collections All Odd and Splendid, Trans, and Divine Honors. She also is the coauthor, with her son, Aaron Raz Link, of What Becomes You, available in a Bison Books edition.

"These are emotionally taut poems, created by the poet to share her self or, perhaps, her many selves with the world at her feet."—Charles Stephen, Lincoln Journal Star

"A moving, still fresh, collection of poetry."—Linda Read Deeds, Nebraska Life

“Hilda Raz has an appetite for the pleasures of touch, sight, love; an openness to the wounds of life and the ‘common face’ of death; a capacity for language that captures the weather and the details of a place and time, a day, the changes of a lifetime. The poetry of What Happens mirrors ‘our great and perfect / need,’ along with myths, riddles, and ‘everything possible blooming.’”—Alicia Ostriker, author of No Heaven

“Underneath ‘ordinary stars and a late moon,’ extraordinary things happen to the people in Hilda Raz’s poems. Love transforms, bodies transform, health transforms, and looked at freshly the things we thought we knew burst into strangeness. There is nothing like Raz’s charged, smart, profound, moving poems, so rich in both intellect and heart, so open and wise, provoked by the question ‘how can we live properly?’ The University of Nebraska Press has done readers a great service by making these early, prize-winning poems available again, reminding us that Raz’s astonishing power was present from the start of her career.”—Floyd Skloot, author of The Wink of the Zenith and The Snow's Music

“Hilda Raz’s poetic diction is always immediate and direct, engaging the reader. She achieves special intensity in her depiction of the human body, its vulnerability, and its capacity for pleasure (see ‘Friend in a Distant City’ and ‘Pain’). Here is a poet at the height of her formidable powers to move and inspire.”—Robert Pack, Distinguished Senior Professor at the Honors College at the University of Montana and author of Still Here, Still Now