Press
2011 Finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award
“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. ”
“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”
“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.”