The Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist
Julie Hanson鈥檚 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鈥檚 is a mind interested in human responsibility鈥攖o ourselves and to each other鈥攁nd unhappy about the disappointments that are bound to transpire (鈥淲e鈥檝e been like gods, our powers wasted鈥). These poems are lonely with spiritual longing and wise with remorse for all that cannot last.
鈥淭he Kindergartners鈥 begins, 鈥淎ll their lives they鈥檝e waited for / the yellow bus to come for them,鈥 then moves directly to the present reality: 鈥淣ow it鈥檚 February and the mat / is wet.鈥 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 (鈥淚 slip in and fold / behind the wheel into the driver鈥檚 seat like a thin young thing: / My organs are surely glistening. This car was made for me.鈥).These poems are intimate revelations, thinking as they go, including the reader in the progress of their thought.
鈥淛ulie Hanson鈥檚 poems are so winningly direct, so deft in tuning and alert in movement, that you only half-notice how beautifully oblique they are鈥斺榯he ways around / a thing unsaid are myriad / and free鈥欌攁nd how entrancing. Until you look up at the end, a little surprised at how far you鈥檝e been carried in a few moments, at how much you鈥檝e been . . . not exactly told but shown how to feel.鈥濃擩ames Richardson, author, Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms
鈥淎 wry eye and a keen sense of the actual rule this delightful collection. In a sincere and compassionate attempt to get at the undertones of daily life, Hanson looks and speaks frankly about the intimate, the private, the deep insides of act and feeling. This is a book that uses thought as a microscope to reveal intricacies that open onto new intricacies鈥攖he kind of book you look up from to find your own life richer, reverberating.鈥濃擟ole Swensen
鈥溾橳o encapsulate the unattainable,鈥 part of the title of the final poem in Unbeknownst, is a good description of the task Julie Hanson鈥檚 poems set themselves. With patient and ingenious variation, Hanson鈥檚 poetry sifts and cleans and weeds and redeems such hard-to-pin-down processes as thinking, reading, dreaming, and conversing鈥攊n other words, living. Grounded in the quotidian and with a fine ear for vernacular (as in the wonderful 鈥楪rab the Far End鈥), Hanson is nevertheless an explorer of the transcendent.鈥濃擱achel Hadas, author, The Ache of Appetite
鈥淭he poems in Julie Hanson鈥檚 delightful Unbeknownst are natural and shapely, with a subtle architecture that you inhabit all the more fully because you hardly notice it. Their language is relaxed and exact, pervaded by an understated and touching humor, and yet the poems hover on the edge of mystery, the mystery of thought. They move in directions that are surprising and unpredictable but that in retrospect seem inevitable, as you 鈥榮lowly make out the shape / of all of this, which is to think.鈥 Unbeknownst is a masterful and moving book.鈥濃擩ohn Koethe
2012 Kate Tufts Poetry Awards Finalist
