Mid Drift: Poems

The poet Major Jackson, author of Holding Company (2010) had this to say about Hanson Foster's Mid Drift: "Hanson Foster dramatizes life (real people and places) in language: and thus, her brilliant poems are to my ears courageous. Most of all she is a lyrical thinker who makes thinking sensuous and alluring. Consider yourself lucky to read her poems, it is truly a distinct experience." Set in post-industrial Lowell, Massachusetts, Mid Drift contains a speaker who is seduced by the "ugliness" of the city including prostitution, alcoholism, homelessness, and infidelity. Many poems also explore themes of family, religion and spirituality, and loss of self. Poet and writer, Amy Gerstler writes of Mid Drift: "Hanson Foster captures the arresting sense of how loss scrapes away layers of one's personhood exposing a quiet resilience, maybe even a rising faith, that glimmers dimly underneath abiding grief like some kind of ore."