Fraying Edge of Sky
Codhill Poetry Award Winner 2017. Between the destruction of angels, creation of philosophers, and use of mythological creatures, "Fraying Edge of Sky" captures a side of the other-world humans don’t see into very often: “A walking stampede, slow and terrible. / The hospital for nonexistent children. / A mountain devouring clouds.” Hanson’s beautiful lyricism and shocking imagery coalesce in wonderment, in poems that play with the power of light and dark, ultimately haunting the pages that make up her magical book, reminding us over and over of how “We are giants over the fallen.”
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
The beautiful and fanciful investigations in Danielle Hanson’s 'Fraying Edge of Sky' are homages to magical realism but are also lyrical bursts in splendidly gilt frames. The precise language of the poems conjures up the overlooked details of a world that, in its hurry, will miss them. The light in a bucket of water, the ribbon-like fog, the small mice who are angelic in their infestations — all are an inventory of the miraculous that Hanson’s truly original voice urges us to hear and to hold close.
Oliver de la Paz Author of "Requiem for the Orchard"
Dismantling worlds only to rebuild them anew, Danielle Hanson’s poems, little worlds made cunningly, as Donne would call them, expose the surrealism behind the most ordinary things. Take the tailor who 'starts by sewing the fraying / edge of sky to a rock' and begins sewing a whole menagerie until he 'creates / a daytime field of constellations, / embroidery of a new creation.' New indeed. These are visions like none other and if you want to see with the kind of fourfold vision Blake suggests, this original, this most precious of books is for you.
Richard Jackson Author of "Broken Horizons"
