Another Name for Bridge

Suzanne Hancock’s debut collection of poems seeks to explore seemingly disparate things: family bonds, self deceit, lost desire, and the final days of Descartes’ life. With precision and urgent honesty these poems take us from an apple orchard in summer, to a Dutch slaughterhouse, to diving from a train bridge. Yet, there is cohesiveness throughout these pages that can be explained by the author’s yearning to discover the world, to be transformed by language and its implications. In Another Name for Bridge, the author attempts to link pieces of the world: experience and memory, one side of the river to the other, the dialogue between natural philosophy and painterly practice. These poems sing the praises of connection, but never seem to forget the vast spaces that cannot be linked.