M

"These ambitious and gorgeous poems are continuously surprising, pushing language into a secret landscape, or a secret history of the intellect." -Juliana Leslie

Swinging between examination and revelation, Hannah Brooks-Motl's second collection of poems, M, holds a unique place in contemporary poetry, written almost as a document to chart the act of a writer reading. By transposing lines directly from the essays of Michel de Montaigne with her own, she creates a shimmering mirage that enables two distinct voices to blend with confidence and to question the steps we take to make sense of the world. That degree of ambition requires great care and thoroughness, the ability to see the past clearly in order to invent a skillfully considered and electric present.
Hannah Brooks-Motl is the author of the poetry collections The New Years (2014), M (2015) and Earth (2019). Her poems and essays have appeared in The Best American Experimental Writing, the Cambridge Literary Review, the Chicago Review, Modernism/modernity and Tupelo Quarterly, among other places. She lives in western Massachusetts.