Poetry. With patience and precision, Hannah Brooks-Motl's third collection of poems, EARTH, explores the grand themes of love, family, economy, and home with the skill of a true craftsman. As the measured compositions of these poems shift, so do their near-sculptural forms, and a feeling both classical and contemporary develops as a result. At times a paean to poetry, other times a critique of it, EARTH is a breakthrough collection by a poet whose ceaselessly sharp intellect continues to use poetry to gain insight into not only her own wants and needs, but ours, and those of poetry itself.

Earth (The Song Cave)

Literature & Fiction

Brooks-Motl, Hannah

Poetry

The Song Cave

Poetry. With "I have countered / I constructed," Brooks-Motl delivers a mode by which THE NEW YEARS unfolds: we are met with the solitude of self, deluged by slow particulars, surrounded by a haunting chorus of readings and readers. Brooks-Motl's formally compelling debut comingles these "coterminous" elements, fomenting a "moment of danger" which, like a watch ticking down the seconds to midnight, is both seductively concrete and unrelentingly ungraspable. The speaker attempts to chart the new years that are upon us and to interpolate understandings within the new years that we have long lingered in. This is a book of persistent reckoning, one that breaks hard against each reflective angle.  "'Ezra Pound was very cold, very white, very much like today,' notes the wry speaker of this ambitious debut, announcing not only an irreverent engagement with the legacies of Modernism, but an eccentric eye on a snow-lit present as well. Poised and yet restless, sensuous yet meditative, declarative and yet speculative, here is a poetics of wild fragmentation true to one soul's struggle with the paradox of time. 'I am not a movie,' she insists, 'Though tonight / I drink many cups of dorm punch / In the snow of ten years back.' The new years this collection offers are rife with skepticism, longing, and quiet exuberance—'a material at once / fulfilled and yet promising.'"—Suzanne Buffam  "Hannah Brooks- Motl can write a killer line and her stunning voice is alive turning every which way, always surprising chiseled densities, ambitious interiors with patches of glory and the need to sing. Here is a vital accounting of life lived, a 'diamond text' wanting to communicate so deep inside and yet always touching upon the diaristic circumstances of the world. This brilliant book, her first book, is a gem."—Peter Gizzi

The New Years

Rescue Press

Poetry. Swinging between examination and revelation, Hannah Brooks-Motl's second collection of poems, M, holds a unique place in contemporary poetry, written almost as a document to chart the act of a writer reading. By transposing lines directly from the essays of Michel de Montaigne with her own, she creates a shimmering mirage that enables two distinct voices to blend with confidence and to question the steps we take to make sense of the world. That degree of ambition requires great care and thoroughness, the ability to see the past clearly in order to invent a skillfully considered and electric present. "Blowing hot and cold with the same mouth" The weapon of memory shattered the sun Lift your eyes to it "In the venerable tradition of mining, Hannah Brooks-Motl engages the poetics of excavation, taking Montaigne's Essays as substrate. The 'M' of the title may be far removed, but his (and her) spirit holds sway via 'the burning light of the past' in 'the little way of adjacency.' Montaigne's 'very limits of the possible' lead onto a quiet exuberance in a poem, for example, where 'Invention got big / in the world / and bigger /... I made it // Wild with making' (this, on imagination). If Brooks-Motl's subtleties sometimes defy a quick 'get,' they also persist in their nested reference, '...like an infant wall of belief / Climbing with ivy at night.' This is the 'great fond wager' of a rich and mysterious work."—Jean Day "M may be for Montaigne, the sixteenth century essayist whose humanist imagination gives Brooks-Motl permission to look elsewhere, into the past for her poetic material, but M is also for 'mind,' a place these poems love to dwell. As readers, we get to dwell there, too, trusting Brooks-Motl to sculpt with care and patience in order to offer a world that 'blooms and moves' more generously. These ambitious and gorgeous poems are continuously surprising, pushing language into a secret landscape, or a secret history of the intellect. Every turn of phrase, every figure and gesture flickers open, making manifest the intimate and precipitous experience of reading into and with the past, alongside its fragments and tendencies."—Juliana Leslie

Ultraviolet of the Genuine

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Books by Brooks-Motl, Hannah

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Brooks-Motl, Hannah. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Earth (The Song Cave)

The New Years

M

Ultraviolet of the Genuine