Poetry. With I have countered / I constructed, Brooks-Motl delivers a mode by which THE NEW YEARS unfolds: we are met with the solitude of self, deluged by slow particulars, surrounded by a haunting chorus of readings and readers. Brooks-Motl’s formally compelling debut comingles these coterminous elements, fomenting a moment of danger which, like a watch ticking down the seconds to midnight, is both seductively concrete and unrelentingly ungraspable. The speaker attempts to chart the new years that are upon us and to interpolate understandings within the new years that we have long lingered in. This is a book of persistent reckoning, one that breaks hard against each reflective angle.
‘Ezra Pound was very cold, very white, very much like today, ’ notes the wry speaker of this ambitious debut, announcing not only an irreverent engagement with the legacies of Modernism, but an eccentric eye on a snow-lit present as well. Poised and yet restless, sensuous yet meditative, declarative and yet speculative, here is a poetics of wild fragmentation true to one soul’s struggle with the paradox of time. ‘I am not a movie, ’ she insists, ‘Though tonight / I drink many cups of dorm punch / In the snow of ten years back.’ The new years this collection offers are rife with skepticism, longing, and quiet exuberance–‘a material at once / fulfilled and yet promising.’–Suzanne Buffam
Hannah Brooks- Motl can write a killer line and her stunning voice is alive turning every which way, always surprising chiseled densities, ambitious interiors with patches of glory and the need to sing. Here is a vital accounting of life lived, a ‘diamond text’ wanting to communicate so deep inside and yet always touching upon the diaristic circumstances of the world. This brilliant book, her first book, is a gem.–Peter Gizzi
