Ambushing Water
Danielle Hanson's debut collection, Ambushing Water, finalist for the 2016 Brick Road Poetry Press Prize. Order here or from Amazon or local bookseller.
Finalist, 2018 Georgia Author of the Year Award
Finalist, 2016 Brick Road Poetry Award
Finalist, 2016 Codhill Poetry Award
Finalist, 2015 Robert Dana Prize for Poetry
Finalist, 2015 Blue Lynx Prize
Semifinalist, 2015 Richard Snyder Prize
Semifinalist, 2015 Miller Williams Poetry Prize
Semifinalist, 2015 Codhill Poetry Award
Finalist, 2014 Robert Dana Prize for Poetry
Finalist, 2014 Blue Lynx Prize
Semifinalist, 2014 Crab Orchard Poetry Series
Semifinalist, 2014 The Washington Prize
Finalist, 2013 Codhill Poetry Award
Semifinalist, 2013 42 Miles Press Poetry Award
Semifinalist, 2013 Crab Orchard Poetry Series
Semifinalist, 2012 42 Miles Press Poetry Award
Semifinalist, 2012 Elixir Press Antivenom Award
Runner Up, 2011 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize
Semifinalist, 2011 Crab Orchard Poetry Series
This book is wonderfully wild! A man eats his wife’s ashes in his cereal every morning. An elderly woman’s breasts are like “pelican beaks full with fish.” Flies make nests of our dreams, and anything can be part-bird or part-bug. Shadows are important. So are puddles. They are possible worlds to be explored — “the water not as a mirror but a window” to be climbed through. Danielle Hanson’s poems reside in shadows and daydreams, but they are not whimsy. They are weighted by emotion. Inside an empty mailbox there is a longing, a loneliness, and Hanson allows that emptiness to evolve into “a small species of bird/with the call of late night radio.” I swear, I have heard that bird call before. I really love these poems.
- Georgia Author of the Year Judge Statement
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 Traversings and Out of Place
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, winner of the international Griffin Poetry Prize
So often in this collection, the circumstance in a single poem offers an unlikely though compelling route into intimacy—“eating his dead wife’s ashes/in his cereal every morning” for example—until the circumstances build to near breaking and the poems show themselves as a constant, valiant, smart struggle to keep the always-vulnerable speaker above water. So many new words are quietly and easily introduced to the world—earthfish, rainstars, mooncat, slugquistadores, sky-puddles—which seems appropriate in these efforts at finding new places to find purchase, new ways to hold on. The poems repeatedly find that new ground, and as readers we hold on just as firmly as the speaker every time.
- Alberto Rios, Arizona's inaugural Poet Laureate and author of A Small Story About the Sky
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 The Resurrection of the body and the Ruin of the World, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great Writers series author
Danielle Hanson's Ambushing Water crashes into the senses like a wave into the earth. Hanson's language is crystal sharp and her imagery sparks off the page like the glittering glare of the sun in still water. Ambushing Water shows the reader "the beautiful distortions of the earth" in each poem. The familiar sight of a bird--a recurring image thought Hanson's collection--transforms into a "French Recipe," a painting, and "a tulip." Through the eyes of the speaker in Hanson's poems, the reader sees the world changed, as if she is looking at its image in an undulating pool. In the end, Ambushing Water lets the reader see the world through the poet's eyes and the reader is left reverent and awed.
Rather than nature’s astounding the speaker, it is she who takes nature by surprise . . .I enjoyed Ambushing Water and will read it again . . . Hanson is a talented writer whose peak is still ahead.
In this short collection, I encountered gasp after gasp of discoveries. The images are strange and precise, surreal and darkly comical. . . After gulping down fifty poems in a single sitting, I felt the world had tilted. Days later, visions keep swirling in my mind. Now I want to go back and savor the book more slowly, if I dare. Sleep hides in the corner 'afraid of the dark as a nightmare / crossed the sky'....
-Jackie Craven, Goodreads
I really enjoyed the agency of the speaker here, through all the small observances. It is a love story but to a beloved but also to the universe. Some of my favorite lines:
A leaf falls. The whole of night clings to that leaf.
Expanding infinitely is a loss of self.
Sleep was hiding in the corner / afraid of the dark
The water not as a mirror but a window.
And what does the bird think of all this? / She dreams constantly of the other side of sky.
-Patricia C Murphy, author of Bully Love
I had the great pleasure of being on a panel with Danielle not too long ago. She was a delight, and I was so entranced by the poetry she read aloud to the audience that I had to pick up my own copy. I’m really glad that I did. Danielle’s prose is full of elegant restraint, surreal metaphors and whimsy that delights the imagination and tugs at your heartstrings.
-Roshani Chokshi, author of Aru Shah and the Song of Death
Powerful and strong: Danielle’s use of nature to address the topics of her poems in a very evocative and strong. Her imagery is unusual, which makes it so powerful, and causes me to stop after each poem and consider its theme, emotions, and message before moving on to the next.
-Amazon review
Listed on Burningword Literary Journal's Recommended Reading
Fraying Edge of Sky
Danielle Hanson's second book, Fraying Edge of Sky, won the 2017 Codhill Poetry Press Award. Order here or from Amazon or local booksellers.
Winner, 2017 Codhill Press Poetry Award
Finalist, 2017 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry
Finalist, 2017 Wick Poetry Prize
Finalist, 2017 Antivenom Poetry Award
Finalist, 2017 Richard Snyder Poetry Award
Semifinalist, 2017 National Poetry Series
Semifinalist, 2017 Crab Orchard Series
Finalist, 2016 Codhill Press Poetry Award
Finalist, 2016 Antivenom Poetry Award
Finalist, 2016 Richard Snyder Poetry Award
Semifinalist, 2016 Elixir Poetry Prize
Semifinalist, 2016 Washington Prize
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 Requiem for the Orchard
Danielle Hanson’s Fraying Edge of Sky traps the sun with mirrors, drowns the moon, staples spiders to the sky. There are strategies and curses, negotiations of light and dark, and, throughout, an ever-thickening swarm of angels that collide, that turn to blood, that infest. Photographs are empty, and even those emptinesses are deleted, leaving new emptinesses that are filled by a relentless drive to see things simultaneously as they are and what they intend to be. A lizard pretends to be a stone, but we still know it is a lizard; it is the pretending that strikes us. This is the heart of Hanson’s poetry: artifice that shows the truth.
-Bradley Paul, author Plasma
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 Broken Horizons
More than being poems of the mind, unconscious or otherwise, Hanson’s poems are situated in the world and in story… the poems rely on myth, fables, and allegory—the stuff of Magical Realism.
I come to lyric poetry with eyes shaped in part by the experience of watching spring storms roll across the high plains at night, deep darkness (especially when the power went out, as it often did) punctuated by flashes of daylight. That is what I hope for in a collection of lyric poetry – both the darkness (complete with the loss of power) and the moments of illumination. In this collection, Hanson delivers.
Short, demanding, haunted poems, an edgy, dark dismantling of sentimentality, and “opposite of nirvana,” a curse “to smite the wicked” that hold up Rilke’s “every angel is terrible” as a motto
-Jami Macarty, author of Instinctive Acts
Hanson’s poems in this volume are thoughtful and thought-provoking in a subtle and at times almost slyly humorous way. Five stars!
-Ronald Baldwin
Most American poetry tends to keep its feet squarely planted on the here-and-now ground. Not a lot of “leaping,” to put it in Robert Bly’s terms: an artistic leap that bridges the gap between conscious and unconscious thought. Namely, the basis of surrealistic imagery.
Danielle Hanson uses such imagery in a wonderfully creative way. One is always surprised when reading her poems. She does not simply follow the logic of a story, as is the case with so much American poetry. Hanson uses imagery to push beyond a simple story line and into a curious and imaginative realm—offering the reader “new paths of association,” as Bly puts it.
-Joe M.
Listed on Burningword Literary Journal's Recommended Reading