Tremolo

Poetry. Women's Studies. In TREMOLO, Kelly Hansen Maher explores the strange grief and strained sensibility that arose from years of recurrent miscarriages. Questioning the bodily and psychological confusion of bearing one living daughter amid several lost pregnancies, Hansen Maher resists the sentimental even as her lament is inevitable. She situates her poems in wildernesses both urban and remote, with a lens that moves from the cultural to the intensely intimate. Against imagery of loons and lakes, residential gardens and city boulevards, she deflects metaphor even as she evokes it. Told in six sections that work as an anchoring score, complete with an Overture, TREMOLO guides the reader to listen for, and hear, meaning in the invisible. In the long poem "Loon Calls for Winifred," written for a stillborn daughter, Hansen Maher uses four varying loon calls and her travels through Minnesota's Boundary Waters as a structural sequence for grief. Her language is, in turns, musical, philosophical, patterned, and plain. TREMOLO tells a cyclical story of unseen loss and private mourning.