Phil

One of the things I love about Another Woman is this resonance and connection between things that open or close or reveal themselves, whether that’s light or petals or things in nature, and then that connection with desire and discovery in the body. And so I’m curious—what do you think about that, and is that something that you were consciously putting into the poems?

Hannah

I wrote most of this book between October 2020 and June 2021. Obviously it was a time when we were in the thick of the pandemic, and it changed all of our relationships to time in really complicated and interesting ways. During that period I was living in a house with a few friends and going through a really intense breakup, while also living with someone who was autoimmune compromised. I couldn’t go into other people’s homes, but I was desperately needing some semblance of privacy in order to grieve this relationship that had ended in an abrupt, horrible way. So I was taking a ton of walks while I was writing this book, and sometimes I would walk all day long. I was living out in the suburbs of Iowa. And it was really easy to walk and to quickly be in a prairie or farmland and just not see anyone for an hour or two.

I think when we’re in a really intense emotional state, whether it’s grief or falling in love, I think we can’t help but transcribe our emotions onto the environment around us. And I think I was doing that a lot while writing this book. I was seeing everything around me dying and experiencing the onset of winter every single day. It didn’t matter if it was raining, if it was snowing, if there had been an ice storm, I still would walk every single day and night. And that continued throughout the spring. So as I was finishing the book, there was the sense of possibility or regrowth that I was experiencing in the landscape surrounding me, and also just in my own being, and so I don’t know if I was consciously thinking of a sense of opening and closing, but I was certainly processing time through the seasons and through this very dramatic landscape that I live in.

Phil

In many of the poems you’ve written there is a sense that the speaker is at once this figure that’s small against the landscape, but also incredibly and deeply connected to it. How does the landscape interact with that sense of reflection that you were talking about? Does being in a landscape like that as a person and as a speaker in a poem, does that give you more latitude to be more reflective?

Hannah

That’s a great question. I think there was something that I needed in the outdoors that was offered to me. And Iowa is an incredibly mercurial state in terms of weather. The weather patterns can change so severely just in the course of an afternoon. It can be a deeply punishing environment—severe cold, severe winds. Our summers are incredibly hot and humid.

And I think when you’re going through any kind of grief, I think inevitably we all reach a point where it’s like, well, no one has ever hurt this much before, or no one knows how much I’m suffering. And I think being in this really severe landscape that is incredibly flat and really reminds you of how small you are, that was humbling. And I think it was also restorative. The topography provided a perspective of my situation that I deeply needed at the time.

Phil

There’s this longing through so many of the poems, especially in the beginning, but throughout there’s this energy, this eroticism, this deep sense of connection to the self and the body’s own sense of desire. And then there’s also at the same time, and sometimes even in the same poem, a comfortability that the speaker has of being alone with themself. And so I think that when people read poetry sometimes they think, OK, this poem’s a love poem or this poem’s a poem about being meditative, and that a poem can only be doing one thing. But what I love about so many of the poems you’ve written is that they’re doing multiple things at the same time. How do you think about simultaneity and duality within poems?

Hannah

What was complicated about that time period and the time period in which so many of these poems were written was I was undergoing a ton of pain regarding this heartbreak, but I was also working in a way that I had never worked before, which is to say that I was writing in a way that I had never written before.

I always dreamed that I would have the space and time to be a writer. Again, because it was the pandemic and I was adjuncting, I had about a month and a half off during that winter break. A friend once said to me, poetry isn’t therapy, which is to say that we shouldn’t think of poetry as something that just comes out of painful experiences. And I agree, but I think the solitude that I was experiencing, the sense of being alone at that time opened up the space in which I could go on these night walks until 11:30 at night, and then I would come home and write until 2 or 3 in the morning.

And so I think maybe the duality I was experiencing at that time was of craving connection and also really relishing this opportunity to be a writer in the way in which I’d always hoped to be. It was incredibly fulfilling and something that I’ve never really experienced to that extent since. Perhaps that’s part of the duality that’s felt in these poems—there’s loneliness, there’s heartbreak, but also my work was sustaining me, as well as really solidifying this identity as a writer that I had always hoped to have. And I felt like I could really claim it. I felt like I could finally claim: I am a writer. I’m treating it seriously. I’m giving it the time that it deserves. And that was extraordinary for me.

Phil

What did you discover in terms of the writer that you want to be?

HannAh

I think part of it was realizing that to be a good poet is to be a voracious reader. I always like to joke that I’m a promiscuous reader. I try to read books that aren’t just what I would naturally be drawn to. I want to read outside of what I’m naturally attracted to. And so I think it just taught me that I needed to treat reading with more reverence and more curiosity, and that I needed to be a much more discerning editor and to not, as I had had in my adolescence, say the first draft of the poem is the poem. I really adhered to that mindset for far too long. And I think I’m in a much better place now where I’m a more discerning editor of my work.

Phil

You mentioned that you were doing a lot of walks at night and there’s a lot of imagery in the book of being out in nature at night or talking about landscapes in a nocturnal setting. And there’s also this contrast between light and dark settings. What do you think about that—taking in so much nature at night, an experience which is very different from what most of what people think of as nature during the day?

Hannah

It’s a completely different space and atmosphere when it’s late at night. This question reminds me of the Franz Wright quote at the beginning of the book that says:

Rumi says, out beyond ideas

of doing good and evil

there is a field

 

I’ll meet you there

A lot of poems occur at the liminal moment between day and night. I’m thinking about the final poem, “Pink Light,” and how these liminal moments, especially when it comes to light, feel more true to the emotional space of the book, which is that there’s not a villain in this book.

I don’t think the character of this book considers herself a victim, and I don’t think she’s a victim. She’s been treated badly, but she’s also behaved badly. And I think what a poem like “Pink Light” does, or what I hope it does, is it kind of does away with the dichotomy of light or dark or good or bad. And it offers a kind of liminal space where she can say, despite everything that’s happened, all the hurt or betrayal, I’m here. And the book can end on that kind of declarative note.

Phil

That’s a great segue into my next question, which is around the transformation I see of the speaker over the course of the book. In the beginning there’s this real grasping for connection, this longing, and then there’s this break, and the speaker gains this greater sense of power and freedom. And as you say, that’s not necessarily inherently a good thing, or it doesn’t inherently lead to good outcomes, but there is this greater sense of power. And I loved that ending of “Dido”:

…I am sifting
like a spate of stars, a cooling calm, a queen,
a woman, a warning.

Talk to me about the way in which the speaker undergoes this transformation.

Hannah

Well, it’s interesting. The first draft of this book was a lot darker and much more abject, and it was just very, very heavy. I was showing it to some friends of mine, including Nina Lohman who just had a book come out this summer. She gave me some advice in relation to the fourth section. She said, “I want to know who this woman is apart from this man or a man. I want to know what does it look like for her to be in her home or for her to just be OK? What would that sound like? What would some of those poems look like?”

And I just kept trying to think, what does it look like for her to just be OK with herself? And there doesn’t have to be a resolution. It doesn’t have to be a success story. What does it look like for her to just have coffee and sit on the couch in the morning to look at the birds outside the window? And maybe not to be at peace, but to just be. I was thinking a lot about that as I was rewriting and writing new poems for the fourth section.

Phil

You definitely get that sense in the fourth section of someone, the speaker being just comfortable in their surroundings. And what I really like about the book is that there’s not some jump, there’s not some easy way to get there. And so that’s what I really loved about the third section. You have a lot of wonderful poems in that section, and I noticed there’s a lot of anaphora. After the harsh break of the relationship ending, there’s this sense of trying to find a new rhythm, trying to set a different cadence to life. Was that on purpose? How do you think that structure can help further the development of themes or what the speaker is going through?

Hannah

I really love this question. Because that wasn’t something I was conscious of in writing those poems or putting together the third section. But I do think that in the third section, there’s a lot of self-convincing that’s going on. And I think when we’re trying to convince ourselves of something, we are repeating ourselves a lot, as if by saying the thing over and over we can start to believe or internalize a certain sentiment. That is part of what the speaker is going through.

And in terms of structure, a lot of the poems in the book are quite short and quite sparse. And there was an intentionality in that. I mean, personally, I love short poems, but I kept thinking about how to express grief on the page without naming it. And I think repetition and brevity can intimate when it’s actually physically difficult to get language out, when you’re so in your body that you’re kind of unable to fully articulate a complete narrative to others or to yourself. Repetition maybe also speaks to that, trying to move beyond the thing and actually not being fully able to get there just yet.

Phil

Another thing I noticed is the presence of deer throughout the book, and you talked about being out at night when you’re more likely to encounter deer. But I’m curious what your relationship is with deer and what they evoke in the poems.

Hannah

Well, originally I was torn between two titles for the book. One was Another Woman and the other was Pelt. And I mean, I liked Pelt because there are a lot of deer in this book. And often if you glimpse a deer, you’re glimpsing a flash of them as they’re bolting away. So you see the pelt, but it’s also a verb and there’s violence there. I liked that there were multiple connotations that felt salient to the book.

But when I was doing these night walks, they felt really important to me as a writer. I was fully cognizant of the fact that I was in a pretty vulnerable position. I didn’t bring a phone and sometimes I was out quite late. It felt like a dare that I was making with the world. But what I found on those walks was that the deer, if I heard them and there wasn’t a franticness to their movement, I knew I was safe. Hearing them meant that everything was OK around me. If I were to hear them running, it might alert me that someone or something else was out there. And so in a way they felt like a sonic and even visual marker that everything was OK, a form of protection. There’s one poem in the book, it’s “Untitled,”: Only I can/startle them. There was just something about how if I heard them it was like, everything’s OK. I’m safe out here. I don’t need to worry.

Phil

As a city boy through and through, I don’t have that in my bones, but I very much appreciate it. So I love the title poem, “Another Woman.” The title poem is just beautiful and wonderful, and it comes so late in the book. As a result, there is this buildup of the speaker transforming, building into something else that may have been. And so I’m curious, what is your thought about who the other woman is in that poem? Is it that the speaker has been replaced by something they have become, or is it that because they’re in a different place physically and mentally, there’s just inherently another figure there?

Hannah

Maybe it’s a bit of both. I feel like I always say to people that I feel as if I’ve gotten to live many different lives and I know that I’m going to live several more iterations of my life in the coming years. I look back at who I was when I was writing this book, and I’m not her anymore. For the character in that poem, it’s capturing that moment where you are shedding one of your skins or stepping into a new one. I do think with the passage of time there are ways in which we change, and I think that’s what’s happening in that moment in the poem.

Phil

I often hear a debate around poetry - whether poems should be easily understood, or if they should lend themselves to ambiguity and multiple interpretations. What are your thoughts on this, including how readers engage with poetry?

Hannah

My partner (who is a poet and a musician) and I talk about this a lot, how one should not have to know the secret biography of a poet's life to appreciate a poem. Part of the challenge and the art of writing is giving the reader all the tools they need to understand -- or be affected by -- the poem. My aim is never to confuse my reader. If someone finds my work inaccessible, that’s a failure on my part. I want to evoke, more than anything, a feeling, a sensibility, an affect. I want someone to read a poem of mine and to say yes before they maybe even fully intuit or can articulate what they're touched by. I'm never lonely when I'm reading poetry. My hope is that no one else experiences loneliness when reading poetry, too.

Phil

Publishing as a poet can often feel daunting - especially a full collection. Can you speak to that process? What were some of the obstacles or challenges that arose for you with Another Woman? 

Hannah

I lucked out with EastOver Press. At every step of the way they have been a dream publication, especially Denton Loving and Kelly March. I just can't thank those two enough for everything they’ve done to support me as a human being and to support my book. But I will say, there was a kind of mourning period for me when the book came out that caught me off guard. Writing a book, much like a love affair, can be so secretive and personal. You’re agonizing over word choice, ordering, enjambment, all the things, and it’s labor intensive but also so fulfilling. And then, all those words that you've kept close are suddenly out in the world. They’re separate from you and the book is suddenly no longer yours: it belongs to its readers. So there was definitely a grief that arose from its publication: mourning that relationship, mourning the experience of writing the poems, mourning letting the work, and the past, go. But now I just have such deep gratitude for everyone who has bought the book, reviewed it, and shown it love. I’m lucky.

Phil

Last question: you mentioned you’re a promiscuous reader. What are you reading now, poetry or not that’s giving you a thrill that’s making you say, wow, this is amazing?

Hannah

Well, currently, I read a lot for work, so I really don’t read much for pleasure. I mean, it’s all pleasure even if it’s for a specific project, but more often than not when I pick something up to read these days it’s either because I’m reviewing it or wondering if I might review it. But a few standouts this summer have been Bennett Sims’ new collection, Other Minds and Other Stories. It’s maybe the most perfect collection of short stories that I’ve read in a really long time. It’s deeply unsettling. And I also haven’t laughed out loud reading a book in a long time, which for people who have read it might think that that’s a little fucked up, but I found it so hilarious. He also just has perfect sentences.

And then I just read Renee Gladman’s book called My Lesbian Novel, and it is a really fascinating book about this character, a kind of persona of Renee Gladman, writing a fictional novel while being interviewed about the process of writing that novel. And so it becomes deeply intertextual, and I just found it so formally exciting. I think she’s brilliant. Everything she writes I just think is really incredible.

I also just read Writings by Agnes Martin for a novel that I’m working on, and I think her writing is so stark and beautiful, and she’s such a fascinating character. Reading her work feels like reading both poetry and philosophy.

And lastly I’m reading a lot of Marguerite Duras right now for a book review of Another Gaze Editions' My Cinema by Marguerite Duras that I’m currently working on. Teju Cole’s Open City was the last really beautiful novel that I read, and Ayşegül Savaş’s The Anthropologists is the best novel of this year that I’ve read. The Anthropologists or Rosalind Brown’s Practice.