Ambushing Water
Subtitle
Poems
"Danielle Hanson must be the incarnation of Gaston Bachelard’s ideal poet, a poet who acutely observes a world as she makes it new. With a vocabulary of images as diverse as slugs, animals, flowers, constellations and emotions, as well as startling situations, she brings us a surrealistic vision that also reads like a rational explanation. A poem titled 'Eating His Dead Wife' gives us one side, a bird eating the reflection of a building gives us another. When she travels, her succinct, epigrammatic descriptions reveal more than most poets can in much longer poems: 'The cobblestones were tense and / looking for crumbs. The sea / waiting to devour the sun,' she says about Puerto Angel. This is an amazing first book, book I cherish, for every page I turn makes me see the world differently, astoundingly, reverently. It’s a book that never ends."
– Richard Jackson, author of fourteen books of poems, including "Traversings," with Robert Vivian, "Out of Place" (Ben Franklin Award), and "Resonance" (Eric Hoffer Award).
Bio
Danielle Hanson earned both a Master of Arts in mathematics and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at Arizona State University in 1998.
Praise for this book
Danielle Hanson's new book 'Ambushing Water' has a deliberate clarity that vibrates through her music and imagery like a crystal glass tapped gently with the bright butter knife. Danielle has always written the most original, provocative yet inevitable love poems. She is simply brilliant.
Norman Dubie International recipient of the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize and author of 28 collections of poetry, including "The Quotations of Bone"
'Ambushing Water' is compelling in its restraint: lyricism is deepened and amplified in these often short, always indelible poems. Danielle Hanson writes of the mysteries of the natural world: 'How laughable is the moon / as an equal sign.' This interrogation of worlds, inner and outer, the self and the earth, gives this collection its transformative power and renders everything new and strange and beautiful.
Paul Guest Author of 4 full-length poetry collections, including "My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge' and a memoir, 'One More Theory about Happiness"
