Mid Drift: Poems - Softcover

Kate Hanson Foster

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0931507278 ISBN 13: 9780931507274

Publisher: Loom Press, 2011

Synopsis

The poet Major Jackson, author of Holding Company (2010) had this to say about Hanson Foster's Mid Drift: "Hanson Foster dramatizes life (real people and places) in language: and thus, her brilliant poems are to my ears courageous. Most of all she is a lyrical thinker who makes thinking sensuous and alluring. Consider yourself lucky to read her poems, it is truly a distinct experience." Set in post-industrial Lowell, Massachusetts, Mid Drift contains a speaker who is seduced by the "ugliness" of the city including prostitution, alcoholism, homelessness, and infidelity. Many poems also explore themes of family, religion and spirituality, and loss of self. Poet and writer, Amy Gerstler writes of Mid Drift: "Hanson Foster captures the arresting sense of how loss scrapes away layers of one's personhood exposing a quiet resilience, maybe even a rising faith, that glimmers dimly underneath abiding grief like some kind of ore."

About this title

About the Author

Kate Hanson Foster gained her MFA in Poetry from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her poetry has appeared in California Quarterly, Comstock Review, Harpur Palate, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Groton, Mass.

Review

What if Kerouac never hit the road, stayed home? In this book of poems, Lowell is the beloved name, place and location where the quiet catastrophes of the heart occur--a wasteland populated by family, church, and mundane affairs. Hanson Foster's grief belongs to the ones who remain, not the ones who flee. She plumbs her psychic wounds to the depths, her poems but love letters fit to be burned, their smoke rising upwards to an indifferent heaven. What lasts are the lyrical transformations such utterances invoke. --Timothy Liu, book cover quotation

Mid Drift is a gathering of poems invoking erosion: loss of self, loss of memory, urban decay, bereavement, and the dissolution of hope. These poems explore how some of us barely inhabit our bodies and pray for erasure, and the symbiotic relationship between freedom and confinement. Hanson Foster captures the arresting sense of how loss scrapes away layers of one's personhood exposing a quiet resilience, maybe even a rising faith, that glimmers dimly underneath abiding grief like some kind of ore. Never florid, the life-sized tragedies here are minutely controlled in the telling, and move with meticulous grace. --Amy Gerstler, book cover quotation

Hanson Foster dramatizes life (real people and places) in language; and thus, her brilliant poems are to my ears vivid and courageous. Most of all, she is a lyrical thinker who makes thinking sensuous and alluring. Consider yourself lucky to read her poems. It is truly a distinct experience. --Major Jackson, book cover quotation

Mid Drift is a gathering of poems invoking erosion: loss of self, loss of memory, urban decay, bereavement, and the dissolution of hope. These poems explore how some of us barely inhabit our bodies and pray for erasure, and the symbiotic relationship between freedom and confinement. Hanson Foster captures the arresting sense of how loss scrapes away layers of one's personhood exposing a quiet resilience, maybe even a rising faith, that glimmers dimly underneath abiding grief like some kind of ore. Never florid, the life-sized tragedies here are minutely controlled in the telling, and move with meticulous grace. --Amy Gerstler, book cover quotation

Hanson Foster dramatizes life (real people and places) in language; and thus, her brilliant poems are to my ears vivid and courageous. Most of all, she is a lyrical thinker who makes thinking sensuous and alluring. Consider yourself lucky to read her poems. It is truly a distinct experience. --Major Jackson, book cover quotation

Edition details

• Publisher: Loom Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0931507278
• ISBN 13: 9780931507274
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64