In the Kettle, the Shriek

"'I could care less,' Hannah Stephenson says with a faux shrug, feigning that tone of contemporary diffidence and cool, but everywhere in In the Kettle, the Shriek this fine new poet indicates that "instead, I care so much." Here is a poet of clarity and connective grace, full of good will and wily stories alike-funny, neighborly, amused, observant, she's a storyteller with an aphorist's flair for precision. And in In the Kettle, the Shriek she gives testimony to our lives together and our struggles alone, turning at the deepest moments to her highest virtues of sanity and acceptance: 'the things that are going to happen, / let me let them.' This is how Hannah Stephenson makes poetic testimony into a manner of lyric, laic testament." -David Baker// "In the Kettle, The Shriek is excellent: inquisitive, taut, ironic, tough, smart, sensitive, tensed, ready. Nothing is taken for granted in these poems, not the cosmic or the molecular. Stephenson explores how we hold ourselves together lately, what can be named or called into us, and our relations with the allegedly inanimate. The unpunctuated questions that comprise many of the poems are an essential part of what this poet is up to. Those queries become the glue of this universe, the building blocks of its matter and anti matter, and also a voice of the zeitgeist." -Amy Gerstler