"We're
profoundly saddened to report that one of our own, the poet Sarah
Hannah, has died tragically, and tragically young. She grew up in
Waban, Massachusetts, the daughter of two painters, Renee Rothbein and
Nathan Goldstein. Having received her B.A. from Wesleyan University
and Ph.D from Columbia University, she latterly taught at Emerson
College in Boston. Her first book Longing Distance (Tupleo) received
widespread acclaim from leading poets such as A.E. Stallings, Linda
Gregerson and many others. The cover of her second - and last - book,
Inflorescence, which is due out fall 2007, features a painting by her
mother.
A talented writer, she was the
kind of person who called it as she saw it, often in ways not everyone
wanted to hear, which is often the way of extraordinary people. Funny,
warm, cynical and lyrical, she was both fragile and powerful, a
combination of such extremes in equal measure. The loss to the
literary world is great. The personal loss to family, friends and her
devoted students is unspeakable. When not engaged in high-brow
literature, Sarah Hannah played guitar in a heavy metal band, and was
proud to have been once kissed by three out of the four Monkees. Ah
well, nobody's perfect. Nobody could have been loved or valued more.
She should have been read more when alive. Read her now, in Poetry
Review Autumn issue 2007 and check out her web-pages here for more
information."
- EVA SALZMAN -
A poem
from Sarah Hannah's second book (Inflorescence, due out shortly
from Tupelo Press), has been posted on these pages: 'Impatiens/Jewelweed'.
Sarah Hannah received a B.A. from
Wesleyan University and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. She is
currently completing her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia
University's Graduate School of the Arts and Sciences. Her poems have
appeared in Parnassus, The Southern Review, Pivot,
Barrow Street, Michigan Quarterly Review, Crab
Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, and other journals. She was
awarded a Governor's Fellowship for residencies at the Virginia Center
for the Creative Arts for summer 2001 and 2002. The original
manuscript which became Longing Distance was a
semi-finalist for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2002.
In 2006 Sarah Hannah was named Poet
Laureate of a local conservation group, The Friends of Hemlock Gorge,
of Newton, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Rattapallax,
AGNI, and Fairy Tale Review (poem nominated for the
Pushcart Prize 2006), among others. She was a contributing editor to Barrow
Street.
-
Governor's Fellowship,
Virginia Center for the Creative Arts
-
Davidoff Fellowship,
Wesleyan Writers' Conference
-
Semi-finalist, Yale
Younger Poets Prize, 2002
Sarah Hannah taught creative
writing and composition at Wesleyan University, Columbia University,
the 92nd Street Y, and in private workshops in New York City.
Longing Distance,
Tupelo
Press 2004.
This is an extremely moving work. I'm
struck by her intelligence of emotion, and her unmistakable voice.
These poems are at once determined, vulnerable, and fierce; she looks
it all straight in the eye. Shadow and lover beware: these poems will
fix you. Sarah Hannah is a true original. I love this book.
—Annie Dillard
The distance of longing, the
proximity of oblivion: the motives that animate these poems are the
contours of perception in a mortal coil. Sarah Hannah is a
physiologist of sight, devoutest scribe to the almost-seen, the
intimated world, even, or especially, as that world is about to be
lost. She is also a worker of wonders. See how, in her hands, the
sonnet becomes an instrument of twenty-first-century meditation. See
how the fish in the marketplace "in greens and ices
swimming" suddenly brings to life again the "river lined
with briars."
—Linda Gregerson
Sarah Hannah's poems are subtly alive
to the many ways the natural world interpenetrates and informs and
interprets human experience. But what impresses me most about them is
their engagement with language itself—words and the forms they
assume—as the link between us and the circumambient universe. Her
work says something at once new and very old, and something we badly
need to hear.
—James Olney
Astronomy, Renaissance literature,
mythology, music, a love of wit and verbal play combined with a
passion for form and scholarship resonate in this lively collection of
poems that marks Sarah Hannah's exciting debut. Whether she is
negotiating Sapphics, syllabics, or sonnets, or contemplating
"the unperceived persistence/in the backward space of
things..." her skills fall gracefully under her sure and delicate
control. This is a stunning first book.
—Colette Inez
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