Unbeknownst
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Julie Hanson’s award-winning collection, Unbeknownst, gives us plainspoken poems of unstoppable candor. They are astonished and sobered by the incoming data; they are funny; they are psychologically accurate and beautifully made. Hanson’s is a mind interested in human responsibility—to ourselves and to each other—and unhappy about the disappointments that are bound to transpire (“We’ve been like gods, our powers wasted”). These poems are lonely with spiritual longing and wise with remorse for all that cannot last.
“The Kindergartners” begins, “All their lives they’ve waited for / the yellow bus to come for them,” then moves directly to the present reality: “Now it’s February and the mat / is wet.” Settings and events are local and familiar, never more exotic than a yoga session at the Y, one of several instances where the body is central to the report and to the net result (“I slip in and fold / behind the wheel into the driver’s seat like a thin young thing: / My organs are surely glistening. This car was made for me.“). These poems are intimate revelations, thinking as they go, including the reader in the progress of their thoughts.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Cedar Rapids, Iowa, native is older than most first-time authors, and her frequently even disarmingly conversational poems draw on experience: she writes as a daughter, a spouse, a mother, an adoptee, a friend, a traveler, a practitioner of yoga, and as an observer of gardens, kitchens, food. Yet many poets have taken on such domestic subjects, and done so (like Hanson) with sophistication (Hanson quotes Seneca, rewrites Sappho, includes a deft ghazal): what sets her apart? First of all, her winning wisdom, her genuinely good advice, proffered garrulously ("I'd rather have/ the kind of marriage where nothing is pre-sorted or arranged for presentation,/ where the plates, be they china or everyday, are set out without pretense") or else through a terse tableau: "The female cardinal isn't the least bit/ disappointed that the shade of red she is is brown./ She looks at him and thinks, Aren't we gorgeous?" Second, her remarkable variety: here are poems made entirely of maxims, poems made from anecdotes, poems made of fragments, slow-motion free verse, even a rapid prose poem; here, too, are a panoply of tones, almost all friendly, hopeful, nostalgic, patient, delighted, or sad.
