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Unbeknownst

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Julie Hanson

March 2011

Sima Rabinowitz

“I love this book,” is this book’s opening line from a poem titled “Use the Book,” and while the poet is not ostensibly referring to her own book, the combination of the self-referential title and this first line are impossible to separate from the book we have in our hands. This is not to say that the poet means she loves her own writing, but that she loves the act of writing, of creating poetry, of offering us her book. One way or another, we’re meant to make the association between the book she loves and the book we’re holding in our hands. “Take this,” the poem ends. How can we think otherwise?

“I love this book,” is this book’s opening line from a poem titled “Use the Book,” and while the poet is not ostensibly referring to her own book, the combination of the self-referential title and this first line are impossible to separate from the book we have in our hands. This is not to say that the poet means she loves her own writing, but that she loves the act of writing, of creating poetry, of offering us her book. One way or another, we’re meant to make the association between the book she loves and the book we’re holding in our hands. “Take this,” the poem ends. How can we think otherwise?

Hanson’s poems are casual in tone and style (nothing formed to draw excessive attention specifically to their linguistic or visual shape), reporting conversations with others, offering up moments of observance and insight in daily activities, and circumspect and understated for the most part, even when they broach more metaphysical themes (“Life without language would be / a registration of the sensual: / sunbeam, warm, move onto rock”). Departures include a series of poems based on Sappho fragments (which seems to be a trend right now, Tupelo Press received more than 1,000 poems for its Poetry Project Web page of new poems inspired by some of the same Sappho fragments from Anne Carson’s recent translation that Hanson uses here); and several more emotionally or linguistically heightened moments: “A family of three or four is too complex!” the poet writes in “Instead.” I admire that exclamation point, which turns a seemingly casual remark into poetry.

There are several poems which treat the theme of a troubled relationship with a brother; a small narrative of spending time seated next to a woman in obvious distress in the airport; poems that exploit the garden-as-a-metaphor-for-life convention; musings on the meaning of family; and poems on the “dance” of marriage. I appreciated, in particular, Hanson’s emotional restraint, even when her themes might lead one to sloppier sentiments.

“Just tell me the truth, I kept insisting,” Hanson writes in “Right This Way, This Way to My Heart.” Despite the book’s title (Unbeknownst), truth-telling appears to be what Hanson expects from others and what she demands of herself.

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