Divining

Literature & Fiction

Hansel, Pauletta

Poetry

Wovenword Pr

The Lives We Live in Houses

Wind Publications

Poetry. "TANGLE is made of poems that ache and grieve, desire and remember, the space between words and the hand. They capture the body's grace and the tumor backlit on a screen. They are waking and dreams, a jagged tear across our sleep. They are winter and a woman's last menses. They are a daughter's final summer at home, her mouth already remembering the tomato's ripeness. Pauletta Hansel's poems are also mystery we can taste here and now. Smoke from a father's cigarette. Packed-dirt yards. Oranges and cloves. Who we are, Hansel tell us, 'is hatched from who we were / this film of self now covering / who we will be.' These are poems to mend us."—Karen Salyer McElmurry, author of Surrendered Child and Motel of the Stars

Tangle

Dos Madres Press

Poetry. "In this wrenching work—sonnet sequences, free verse lyrics, journal entries—Pauletta Hansel confronts the slow and agonizing demise of her dementia-stricken mother. This is not the first time Hansel has taken pen up in an extended confrontation with death; each time she does, we must admire anew her courage, tenacity, and her willingness to give all to art. PALINDROME is the saga of a daughter growing older and becoming the caregiver as her mother declines into a sometimes child-like helplessness. And it is the transformation of suffering, grief, and guilt into expert writing of the highest empathy and honesty." —Richard Hague

Palindrome

Poetry. "I read in a glossary of mining terminology that prize means to lever or loosen with a pry bar or pick. And the term suggests the noun for what is gained: a prize. In COAL TOWN PHOTOGRAPH, Pauletta Hansel prizes memory for the resource that it is. Throughout, this book dives into the challenge of the past as place. Its journey is from underground-darkness to a state of earned brightness. As she tells us in the title poem: 'I am from / a place that could not hold me, / never even tried. Come morning, / mist of evening rain, a ghost above a mirrored sun.' We should prize the work of this traveler forever."--Roy Bentley

Coal Town Photograph

Product Description Heartbreak Tree is a poetic exploration of the intersection of gender and place in Appalachia. "There is a road, but the road is still inside you," the mature Hansel tells the girl she was, encouraging her: "You are trying. Remember." This book does the work of that remembering, honoring the responsibility of the poet to speak the forbidden stories of her own and other women's lives. Review Women. We belong to a secret sharing, among mothers and daughters, girlfriends and sisters and lovers. We see each other across the grocery line, or in traffic, or in the salon-and we nod, knowing that we each have suffered brutalities, unnamed. We survive what others do to us, and we survive what we do to us, so often in self-violating silence, as we go on because we must-mustn't we?-smiling, pleasing. But sometimes, rare and sure, a voice comes out of this silence, unpleased and singing; sometimes, somehow, a woman knows how to transform this violence into medicine, enough to share. Pauletta Hansel's Heartbreak Tree is just such a miracle. Every unflinching, healing poem tells the mother, daughter, girlfriend, lover who is silenced inside me to never forget: it is only the truth that sets us free.-Rebecca Gayle Howell, Author, American Purgatory; United States Artists Fellow, 2019Heartbreak Tree is a gorgeous book, carefully assembled from flowers, dirt, graveyards, family memories, and letters to the poet's younger self. It's a love story to a place and a people, an excavation, a time capsule, a fierce inquiry and a song. Read it once for the pleasure of the honest voice, read it again for the beauty of the land and lamentation at its destruction, and keep reading it because its heartbeat, however specifically regional, is the same that pulses through all of us, whispering "home, home, home."-Alison Luterman, In the Time of Great Fires, winner of the 2020 Catamaran Poetry PrizePauletta Hansel's Heartbreak Tree is the breakout work of a lifetime, a work of breaking silences and ancestral truth telling, of weighing what poet Mary Oliver called a "box of darkness" in heart and hand like the pound of flesh it extracted-and finding it a strange gift of hard growth, harder knowledge and wisdom, and perhaps most importantly, self-forgiveness.-Linda Parsons, author of Candescent and This Shaky EarthPauletta Hansel's poems were born in the hardscrabble mountains of Kentucky. The splendor of their moments of beauty that spring up like "ironweed purpling/ the spent fields" seems earned, deserved.-Michael Simms, author of American Ash, and editor of Vox Populi

Heartbreak Tree: Poems

Madville Publishing

Poetry. "'With every curse a little blessing,' Pauletta Hansel quotes in her chapbook FRIEND, a collection of epistolary poems written during the first six months of the pandemic. The centerpiece of this collection is a collage that encompasses botany, science, and the history of an invasive species. This is a masterful collection that moves from the wildlife markets of Wuhan to the streets of Ohio. It isn't easy to find affirmation in the midst of loss, and yet Hansel finds blessings by recognizing the things that we have always had--friends, family, and 'the ordinary miracle of rhizome and bulb.'"--Cathryn Essinger

Friend

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

Books by Hansel, Pauletta