The Miracle of Mercury (e-book) (used book) | Joan Hanna | bookbook.eu

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Book Blurbs:

Joan Hanna’s poems may be “mercurial” in their beguiling shifts of tone, but they also reveal a surprising stability. I mean that, despite the dangerous territory that Hanna plumbs here—stories of familial conflict, as well as the ravages of recent American history—still, these are the poems of a survivor, and they offer their reader the reliable, sustaining pleasure of hard-won and well-made art. I’m certain that we will be reading poems such as “Tile and Stone,” “Rick,” and “Glass” for a long time to come. -Peter Campion author of Other People, Lions and El Dorado


Joan Hanna dances with danger. Her words scorch the page as she explores memory through the elements—fire, water, air—and woos their magic as they woo those who dare tempt the fates. In one moment, mesmerizing beauty. In another, poison permeates from magnificence. In The Miracle of Mercury, Hanna touches the stove not to see if it is hot but to feel how it burns the flesh. These poems are dangerous in their beauty, haunting in their execution. Hanna embraces their miracles and their madness with an equal, attentive eye.
—Lori A. May, author of Square Fee


Mercury as an element is poisonous, free flowing, fascinating and beautiful; both freezing and burning with the same touch. As mercury changes shape with shifts in temperature, so the poems in The Miracle of Mercury elude, allude and tease language as easily as a child cracking open a thermometer attempting to touch her own mortality without pulling back. These poems are about the delicious power of dangerous objects and surviving amid a chasm that cannot be understood. –Millicent Borges Accardi Author of Woman on a Shaky Bridge and Injuring Eternity