Magical realist poems, odes to nature and natural forces, and elegies to animals loved and unloved.
Danielle Hanson's latest collection of poems, The Night Is What It Eats, explores several interlacing themes: saints complaining about their Heaven, body parts disassembled and put to use in a surrealistic bending of reality, elegies to animals loved and unloved. These magical realist poems and odes to nature and natural forces address the world we live in, but dismantled and reassembled. Parts of the whole are set free, like St. Lucia's eyes, to see the world on their own.
About the Author :
Danielle Hanson is author of Fraying Edge of Sky, winner of the 2017 Codhill Press Poetry Prize, and Ambushing Water, Finalist for the 2018 Georgia Author of the Year Award; and editor of Objects in This Mirror (coedited with Julia Beach Anderson) and Sightlines: View Points on Susheel Kumar Sharma's "The Door is Half Open." She is Marketing Director for Sundress Publications and teaches poetry at UC Irvine. She serves as the Poet Laureate of Costa Mesa, California.
Review :
"The Night Is What It Eats comes stitched together by a startling bestiary—creatures within our reach or beyond our grasp that rouse the imagination. Attuned to the interior and exterior worlds of animal instinct and human behavior, Danielle Hanson's poems guide us closer toward clarity, self-discovery, and above all, wonder." — Rigoberto Gonzalez, author of To the Boy Who Was Night and The Book of Ruin
"The Night Is What It Eats is an initiation into a surreal and heartbreaking world. The poems are mesmerizing warnings that thrum and remind the reader that 'you never come out of nature unmarred.' Hanson has created a lush maze with ascensions at every turn." — Jenny Sadre-Orafai, author of Dear Outsiders and Malak
"I have been waiting for the new Danielle Hanson for years—and The Night Is What It Eats is certainly worth the wait. This is an extraordinary collection—out of aphorisms and lyric fables, Hanson weaves a chorus of poems that give us dreams which we soon see reflect and re-imagine our world. 'Cloud is guarding the henhouse,' the poet says. 'The ear is the snail of the head,' the poet says. A tough wisdom arrives: 'Sometimes the Angel of Death misses / the beak not piercing the brain. Sometimes / all that is taken is an eye.' Soon, the reader realizes there is something very hypnotic about Hanson's vision: the poems truly do act as spells, as totems, the meaning rolls on the tongue, as the pages turn. And as I read on, I learned what I should have known but never noticed. That 'naming something is committing it to memory,' for instance. That 'hand is a dead-end of the arm,' for instance. There is magic here. So 'the mouse / collects footfalls / to make a nest' and 'air holds its breath.' Friends, Danielle Hanson is re-defining our world here, this book is truly spellbinding." — Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa
