Between the Pillars

Hannah Darling Fenn's wonderstruck poems of and from the "belly of things" come in full-hearted exquisiteness and hardened hope. In Between the Pillars, how we were is how we might be if we can. With acute touches and tracings, these poems take to the breath to gather moments into a moment, keeping now in how we recall the great then. These words and wolves run free in boundless shapes, commanding subtleness and severity with a carefree care of rhythms and familiar ways altogether new.

-Craig Wright, Professor of Creative Writing at Southern Oregon University

After reading Hannah's writings I keep them closely with me. Her pictures can sting like memory and soothe, because you feel that she has found one of your secret places. Very thankful she has recorded her worlds and offered us their calling.

-Cory Chisel, GRAMMY-nominated songwriter

In this wry, tender collection, Fenn engages in what feels, at times, like a pretend game of hide-and-seek with nothing less than her own delicate joy in the mundane-in "hours like tiny, weightless doors"-ushering herself and those she loves between the facades of social convention and the internal rapture of a "peace washed over." While this collection invokes humanity's oldest archetypes, it also bids them take a child's form, as "clay in [the] hands and a hum in [the] mouth." It is a hymn to a life lived slowly, and to the earth itself, which takes on a sentience, over and over again, in these pages.

-Laura Page, author of Dove, Coyote (Ghost Peach Press, 2020)