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Wonder Tissue
- GenresPoetry
86 pages, Paperback
Published September 1, 2019
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About the author
Hannah Larrabee
10 books4 followersHannah Larrabee's Wonder Tissue won the Airlie Press Poetry Prize and was longlisted for a Massachusetts Book Award. Her new chapbook, The Observable Universe, is out from Lily Poetry Press. Hannah's had work in Flypaper Lit, River Heron Review, Gertrude Press, Maine Review, Molecule, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. Hannah wrote poetry for the NASA James Webb Space Telescope program and read her work at Goddard Space Center. She participated in an Arctic Circle Residency with artists and scientists in October 2022. Hannah received an MFA from the University of New Hampshire where she studied with Charles Simic, and she’s an editor at Nixes Mate Review. She is currently pursuing a graduate certificate in regenerative agriculture.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 24, 2020
Review of Hannah Larrabee’s Wonder Tissue by Carol Barrett
One of the values I cherish in my students’ work is the integration of disparate domains – of the affective mode with cerebral territory, the probes of lived experience with the grandeur of theory, the crisp assessment of a text with the imagination unfurled by a question. Wonder Tissue is a book which excels at integration, perhaps suggested by its section titles: Right Hemisphere, Left Hemisphere. These are poems which move easily between the physicality of a precise moment and the vast reaches of wonder, which in swift-moving passages transport me from a leaf to the sky, from the tenderness of a lover’s back to the quandary of illness, from what it is to be alive in the moment, to that place beyond living.
If the value of poetry is measured in the repertoire of memory recalled by the reader, then in that way too, this collection succeeds marvelously for me. I sort through the rocks I collected as a child, saved in the firm squares of a wooden box my father built to hold them. I go for a drive in my first car, a rusty red Ford Falcon gifted by my grandmother when she gave up driving. I climb a cedar tree to undo the tangled confusion of a young romance. I feel the long, wet grass outside my sleeping bag parked under the stars. I remember my last conversation with a friend who died of cancer, who asked me to define hope.
These are poems which derive their being from a creative array of sources – the works of scientists, philosophers and spiritual teachers, the sometimes uncanny news that reveals strange experience, the gifts of music and art, the relationship with a lover. Notes to accompany the poems are provided liberally, so that the reader is connected to the inspiration the poet experienced.
They are also poems memorable for their facile shifts between senses. In “To Be Alone with You,” the hands plucking harp strings become the beaks of chickadees carrying sound. In “Stem” there is illness, a waiting room, an excursion to an Arctic Village falling into rising seas, and ultimately, the sharing of food. These are poems which stretch to hold what is untenable, and which rebound often to a place of acceptance. They reside in dreams as often as they come to “the river at the mouth of the ocean.” They are generous with grace. They honor love both with discrete testimony, and with the spark of a comet falling to earth, with soulful reflection that unites us with early ancestors. Larrabee is a poet who embraces the world with wonder, just as a tree “has learned to love sunlight.”
-- Carol Barrett teaches at Union Institute & University and at Saybrook University. She has published three books: Drawing Lessons (poems), Calling in the Bones (poems) and Pansies (creative nonfiction.)
One of the values I cherish in my students’ work is the integration of disparate domains – of the affective mode with cerebral territory, the probes of lived experience with the grandeur of theory, the crisp assessment of a text with the imagination unfurled by a question. Wonder Tissue is a book which excels at integration, perhaps suggested by its section titles: Right Hemisphere, Left Hemisphere. These are poems which move easily between the physicality of a precise moment and the vast reaches of wonder, which in swift-moving passages transport me from a leaf to the sky, from the tenderness of a lover’s back to the quandary of illness, from what it is to be alive in the moment, to that place beyond living.
If the value of poetry is measured in the repertoire of memory recalled by the reader, then in that way too, this collection succeeds marvelously for me. I sort through the rocks I collected as a child, saved in the firm squares of a wooden box my father built to hold them. I go for a drive in my first car, a rusty red Ford Falcon gifted by my grandmother when she gave up driving. I climb a cedar tree to undo the tangled confusion of a young romance. I feel the long, wet grass outside my sleeping bag parked under the stars. I remember my last conversation with a friend who died of cancer, who asked me to define hope.
These are poems which derive their being from a creative array of sources – the works of scientists, philosophers and spiritual teachers, the sometimes uncanny news that reveals strange experience, the gifts of music and art, the relationship with a lover. Notes to accompany the poems are provided liberally, so that the reader is connected to the inspiration the poet experienced.
They are also poems memorable for their facile shifts between senses. In “To Be Alone with You,” the hands plucking harp strings become the beaks of chickadees carrying sound. In “Stem” there is illness, a waiting room, an excursion to an Arctic Village falling into rising seas, and ultimately, the sharing of food. These are poems which stretch to hold what is untenable, and which rebound often to a place of acceptance. They reside in dreams as often as they come to “the river at the mouth of the ocean.” They are generous with grace. They honor love both with discrete testimony, and with the spark of a comet falling to earth, with soulful reflection that unites us with early ancestors. Larrabee is a poet who embraces the world with wonder, just as a tree “has learned to love sunlight.”
-- Carol Barrett teaches at Union Institute & University and at Saybrook University. She has published three books: Drawing Lessons (poems), Calling in the Bones (poems) and Pansies (creative nonfiction.)
January 3, 2020
Poems on the miracle of human consciousness in its relation to the cosmic, the natural, and other minds. These poems range far and wide from galaxies, to insects, to climate change, to the irrationality of current event, but always coming back to the complexities, joys, and pains of human love and hope. No one writing today combines and understanding of the abstract complexities that govern our universe with the felt reality of human love and desire as well as Larrabee does.
One of my favorite books of the year!
One of my favorite books of the year!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews