It's the Publication Day for Crow Funeral!

March 8, 2022 Kate Hanson Foster

“God or no God,

let us make it more than what it is.”

Crow Funeral Cover Reveal

January 31, 2022 Kate Hanson Foster

Forthcoming March 2022

**“God doesn’t know a thing about mothers”**
If you take God out of women, there is no God. Kate Hanson Foster’s world is a beautiful barn, a frightening mind, and a shimmering street. A timeless America.
— Kristin Hersh
American singer-songwriter and author of *Seeing Sideways: A Memoir of Music and Motherhood*
Through poems of motherhood, mortality, loss and faith, Kate Hanson Foster’s collection *Crow Funeral* posits what it means to not only make a secure home for your children, but to become the literal dwelling place. From gestation through birth and the accrual of days spent mothering, Hanson Foster circles the challenges and hard truths all mothers must face. Hanson Foster’s unflinching examination of post-partum depression and anxiety is tempered with love letters to her children:
*“I became a mom / only once, you know. // You are the bike / I learned to ride.”*
She writes stark lyrics for home, her complicated relationship with Catholicism, her husband as father and lover, and most powerfully, her own body. Hanson Foster not only honors her body’s capability to bear and sustain children and nurture a family, but sings praises to its sensuality. *Crow Funeral* depicts the unique intimacy between a mother and her children, an intimacy which sometimes blurs the line between “me” and “we,” that which *“God doesn’t / know a thing about,”* fraught with overwhelming love and shot through with ferocity.
— Sarah Sousa
Author of *Hex and See the Wolf*
In *Crow Funeral*, drama and desire build line by line and poem by poem. The work here is intensely personal. The narrative and its themes concern specific human beings, yet they maintain a universal posture that calls all of us closer to our humanity. Kate Hanson Foster is a poet of uncommon wit, charm, candor, and clarity. She keeps her focus on the poems, not the poet, and deploys her abundant skills to create an enduring and important testament that is simultaneously devastating and hopeful.
— Michael Kleber-Diggs
Author of *Worldy Things*, winner of the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize

Friends: I Have a Big Announcement! I Have a Book Deal!

August 4, 2021 Kate Hanson Foster

Friends: I have a big announcement! Yesterday I signed a contract with EastOver Press to publish my book of poems titled, Crow Funeral. As many of you know, this is a book I once gave up on. I never wanted to publicly bury my book, but I needed some grand, (albeit dramatic) gesture to find peace in saying goodbye to a manuscript that I had put everything of myself into for 5 years.

I owe an immense amount of gratitude to my friends, you know who you are, who eventually forced me to dig the words back up again. “I’m retired” I said. “Join this Zoom writing group,” you said. I added new poems, I took poems out, I stopped submitting for over a year. It felt good to write only for the voice that lives inside me. The Crow Funeral that will be published is not the book I buried. It is a different kind of story now, even if many of the original poems remain.

I want to thank EOP editor, Denton Loving for that phone call I never thought I’d get—for believing in my work, and wanting to put it out into the world. EastOver Press is the home where my book belongs, and I’m so thrilled. Crow Funeral will be published in spring/summer 2022.

Want to know a little bit about what a Crow Funeral is?

I have an essay I wrote that talks a bit about it here.

Thank you again to all of you that continue to believe in me and what I write. I really do have some pretty sweet friends…and a husband who is my biggest fan.

Love,

Kate

Open: Journal of Arts & Letters: Featured Writer

June 4, 2019 Kate Hanson Foster

I’m so grateful to have been the featured writer for OJAL for the month of May. Seven of my poems were published, as well as a craft essay and an interview. Since the content came out daily in individual posts, I’m compiling it into this blog post for easier access. This feature means so much to me because all of the content is pulled or inspired from my current manuscript, titled Crow Funeral. The next step is finding it a happy home!

Thanks again for reading.