Spikenard

“Light on light on light . . . burning beautifully,” Zinnia Hansen makes a shining debut with this luminous collection, a potent distillation of “every beautiful thought at once.”

Rena Priest, Washington State Poet Laureate ’21–23

‘I took a hammer/ to my words,/ but forgot the nails,’ Zinnia Hansen writes in her debut collection. As each poem alternately sprawls and condenses, breathes horizontal and compresses down, a form of worship emerges at the nexus of watching a world burn and wondering ‘who is going to cut a hole in the/ horizon and let out the smoke,’ feeling aging turn in on itself and begin again like ‘Russian nesting dolls filled with moist earth,’ and finding reverence in the paradoxes of transcendental awe and a desire ‘to burn the/ garden God planted in my belly.’ The book transforms into its own cathedral of sun and the particular smell of Pacific Northwest trees—and, as it examples how ‘even love is a form of deconstruction,’ you are invited in to be transformed with it.

C. R. Grimmer, author of The Lyme Letters

Zinnia Hansen finds love in artichokes, salmon, and the yellow sign ‘telling you to slow as you drive down our neighborhood road,’ and mystery in the mother who ‘captures the weather of the world in a cup.’ She falls asleep ‘reading about duende; reading, radiating duende’ and struggles to make peace with the body, the question of God, and the persistent uncertainty of belief. Here is a beautiful young mind writing her way into the great conversation. Ready Spikenard and celebrate.

Kathleen Flenniken, author of Post Romantic