Remnants of Hannah

By Dara Wier

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• Remember when I told you about the memory competitions?
  
  Memories, apologies, and misunderstanding compete in this series of lyric poems that are intricately connected in their ability to recollect and speak to one another. A deftly woven tenth collection from a respected poet with a rapidly ascending reputation.

• I like this about Wier--a generosity. She offers the same openness in her lines, which read, again, as the self catching and setting free signals of the world.
  Olivia Cronk, Bookslut
  
  I like the deceptively-clear statements to Wier’s poems, her prose-stares that wind their way across the page in ways that poems are supposed to, and even not supposed to. There is a wonderful sense of gracefulness to these poems, and thus, the entire collection, which make me glad to have heard of her at all, and make me want to find at least one of her nine previous poetry books.
  Rob Mclennan
  
  Wier seems to bypass traditions of narrative and the surreal to communicate the loss of sense, politically, patriotically. She uses vertiginous distances, and quiet allusions and metaphors from nature and the shapes of thought. All these qualities add up to a lyrical interrogation of America, one devoid of pop diction, and cluttering references.
  Cynthia Arrieu King, Octopus Magazine
  
  The beauty of this collection of poems is most stunningly revealed in the deliberate repetition of images, words, objects, and phrases, all of which create a web that replicates the interconnectedness of events, emotions, and things to one another.
  Amanda McGuire, Mid-America Review
  
  

• Dara Wier is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including In the Still of the Night (forthcoming from Wave Books, 2017) You Good Thing (Wave Books, 2013), Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2009), Remnants of Hannah (Wave Books, 2006), Reverse Rapture (Verse Press, 2005, 2006 SFSU Poetry Center Book Award), Hat On a Pond (Verse Press, 2002), and Voyages in English (Carnegie Mellon, 2001). Also among her works are the limited editions (X In Fix) in Rain Taxi’s Brainstorm Series, Fly on the Wall (Oat City Press), and The Lost Epic, co-written with James Tate (Waiting for Godot Books, 1999). Her poetry has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the American Poetry Review. In 2005 she held the Rubin Distinguished Chair at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia.
  
  Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conduit, Denver Quarterly, The Fairytale Review, Hollins Critic, jubilat, New American Writing, slope and Volt, among other magazines.
  
  She teaches workshops and form and theory seminars at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-directs the University of Massachusetts’ Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action. Each June she teaches a poetry workshop for the Juniper Summer Institute. Her editing work includes publishing limited edition chapbooks and broadsides with Factory Hollow Press, North Amherst, Massachusetts, a small independent press she co-edits with Emily Pettit and Guy Pettit. Along with James Haug and James Tate she has edited the University of Massachusetts Press Juniper Series for poetry.