Longing Distance

About the Author

Sarah Hannah received a B.A. from Wesleyan University, an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Parnassus, Agni, Rattapallax, Western Humanities Review, New Millennium Writing, The National Poetry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Harvard Review, and many other journals. She was also an editor at Barrow Street Press, and Poet Laureate of The Friends of Hemlock Gorge, an organization of nature conservators in Newton, MA. She was awarded a Governor’s Fellowship for residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for summer 2001, 2002 and 2006. The original manuscript which became Longing Distance was a semi-finalist for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2002. Poems from Inflorescence have been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes. She grew up in Newton, and until her death in May 2007, taught poetry writing and literature at Emerson College.

Advanced Praise

“The distance of longing, the proximity of oblivion: the motives that animate these poems are the contours of perception in a mortal coil. Sarah Hannah is a physiologist of sight, devoutest scribe to the almost-seen, the intimated world, even, or especially, as that world is about to be lost. She is also a worker of wonders. See how, in her hands, the sonnet becomes an instrument of twenty-first-century meditation. See how the fish in the marketplace “in greens and ices swimming” suddenly brings to life again the “river lined with briars.”—Linda Gregerson

“Sarah Hannah’s poems are subtly alive to the many ways the natural world interpenetrates and informs and interprets human experience. But what impresses me most about them is their engagement with language itself—words and the forms they assume—as the link between us and the circumambient universe. Her work says something at once new and very old, and something we badly need to hear.” —James Olney

“Astronomy, Renaissance literature, mythology, music, a love of wit and verbal play combined with a passion for form and scholarship resonate in this lively collection of poems that marks Sarah Hannah’s exciting debut. Whether she is negotiating Sapphics, syllabics, or sonnets, or contemplating “the unperceived persistence/in the backward space of things…” her skills fall gracefully under her sure and delicate control. This is a stunning first book.”—Colette Inez

Longing Distance receives worthy praise in the Spring 2006 issue of Home Planet News. The full review may be found here.

Sarah Hannah is interviewed and Longing Distance (Tupelo Press, 2005) is featured on Doug Holder’s blog, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene.

Slope literary magazine features a review of Longing Distance in the Fall/Winter 2005 issue.

Ann Stapleton of the Newpages.com reviewed Longing Distance.

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-11-8