VOID

by Hanna Tawater

VOID is both an interactive & meditative experience, as Tawater’s poems force us to examine our own bodily selves on this earth; the space we amass, how we connect to nature through beauty & grotesqueness, & our never-ending search for knowledge amongst the dark mysteries of the universe.

110 pages, Paperback

Published December 31, 2022

About the author

Hanna Tawater is the author of the poetry collections VOID (White Stag, 2022) and Reptilia (Ayahuasca, 2018). She completed her MFA in writing, with focus on interdisciplinary poetry, at UC San Diego. Her work has appeared in various publications, both online and in print. She teaches interdisciplinary and multigenre writing in San Diego, where she lives with entirely too many cats.

Reviews

[Erin Hoover · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved VOID so much! Here's what I wrote about it to help promote the book:

If teasing out the beauty and terror of the human search for knowledge is your thing, meet Hanna Tawater’s second collection of poetry, VOID. Tawater taps the poetic languages of quantum physics, planetary bodies, ecology, and popular psychology, locating their junctures with sharp insight and sometimes cringing self-awareness. “Being the center of an elliptic is hard work,” she asserts in a poem about blazars, before conceding “I, too, want to revel in the cataclysms.” In a monstrous portrait of depersonalization, Tawater’s speaker is “shedding, unhinged, my jawbones / loosened until both feet slide neatly through / the throat of this solipsism.” VOID is a mind-bending sprawl of a book that takes the measure of our mortal coordinates.

All true! VOID is thought-provoking but also just plain fun to read, the kind of book where you find yourself circling and underlining various lines to remember later.

[Kiik · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I read Hanna Tawater’s thrilling poems, I feel like my eyes travel to what is infinitely distant and then back to what is infinitely small. I am blasted in “a beam of ionized matter,” as it says in her poem “TXS 0506+056,” down to the subterranean core, in “Ghost Neutrino.” Antimatter, time crystals, ghost towns, and alien megastructures populate this innovative new work from an electrifying talent.