CONJURING THE HURRICANE

Hanson documents the pains of love and abuse in this debut poetry collection.

The author may have been doomed from the start; as the first poem in her collection begins, “I grew up in the hallways of my father’s anger, / his mood a thermostat nobody could regulate.” Across these poems, the speaker wonders if her father’s temperament influenced her later attraction to abusive men. She describes a boyfriend flying into a rage when she put too much cilantro in a cheese dip: “His anger fueled the entire drive, and he was on a full // tank: hitting the dashboard, jerking the wheel to scare / me, jabbing his lit cigarette in my face, while I cradled / the offending crockpot warm against my stomach, // trying to cry as quietly as possible.” The poet examines the many forms love takes and the many different ways it can make a woman feel. From the shame of being a mistress who breaks up a friend’s marriage to the terror of leaving a man about to kill her to the expansive joy of being in a safe and loving relationship, Hanson deftly explores the overlapping and often contradictory emotions that can characterize a romantic endeavor. She excels at choosing moments of symbolic resonance, as evidenced in “As I Tend to My Succulents, I Hear My Father Say I’m Doing It Wrong.” The poems are at their best when she pushes into the murkiest corners of her own romantic psyche, as in “You Are Always Free To Run,” where she articulates with unsettling clarity why, rather than running away from her abusive partner, she ran toward him: “When I first saw the crack, when / I first heard him say the / words that kicked in the door, / I said, Listen, listen this is / your chance, love is so / ready, and I ran with arms stretched wide, / our hearts and our past broken fully open.” The book reads more like a memoir than a straightforward poetry collection, which only deepens its impact.

A stirring collection of poems about love’s destructive powers.