The poetic of Hannah Dow is encapsulated in the word emotion.

Dow’s poetry seeks, first and foremost, to capture living moments. Her poems do not communicate; they enact.

Dow’s poetry draws upon a wide array of influences as it seeks to weld emotion onto word. Aesthetically, her work recalls the poignancy of early Confessional poets such as Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. But unlike so many neo-Confesisonlists, Dow looks both inward and outward, forward and backward. Her work echoes with impressions from such disparate sources as Eliot, Ashbery, Beckettt, and Nietzsche as it reflects upon the intersections of experienced emotion and existential philosophy.

The poems presented in this showcase reflect upon the experience of passing time; they chart the intellectual motions by which we give definition to life, in contradistinction with death. In essence these poems question how we live – how we order our reality, our values and our selves. In her own words:

“When it becomes difficult for me to even pick up the pen, I turn to Williams: “Compose. (No ideas/but in things) Invent!” All emotion is real and raw. A poem’s honesty is more important than its subject matter, and the realm of human emotions is universal, no matter what one has experienced. We must seek meaning through experience itself.”