Slope Move by Hanna Andrews

SLOPE MOVE is a poem in three parts that travels--through Berkeley, Iowa, Illinois--a sort of reverse migration. The you and I are in a relationship that is all about motion, all about refusing to rest, and much of this book, as a result, takes place in the spaces of travel: at a Motel 6, in an airplane, in traffic. It is through this motion that SLOPE MOVE is attentive to the quaking that makes everyone in relation to everyone else."--Juliana Spahr

"SLOPE MOVE is bittersweet indeed: a thorny junction between emotion, image, situation, abstraction. Discomfort hides (in plain sight) in details which ground the lyricism and allow complexity to the narrative. The birds are noticed, aren't they."--Thalia Field"

Hanna Andrews's poems are so open to revelation that their aha moments, their pivots, sometimes take place mid-word. In SLOPE MOVE, words proceed with a kind of faith that makes them foreshadow what comes next, like little prophets. Lines contain within themselves ghosts, or maybe seedlings, of future versions of themselves. So an earlier phrase is haunted, or maybe germinated, by a later version of the same. The configuration, the reconfiguration, seeking to find its right frame, is part of how what is human slips into Andrews's poems, part of how these poems start to act like life, like a beautiful person thinking."--Kathryn Cowles"

Andrews turns to the sonic qualities of language as a source of unity, coherence, and structure. We are made to experience the materiality of each line, offering us stanzas that crack, sizzle, and hum. What's intriguing about SLOPE MOVE is that relationships need not be made to fit within any preconceived conceptual framework. Rather, they emerge organically as she utilizes the repetition of sounds to forge connections between disparate images, ideas, and types of language. [Andrews] calls upon her reader to 'connect the dots, ' to learn a new way of inhabiting language."--Kristina Marie Darlin

Paperback, 76 pages

Poetry