Hannah Brooks-Motl, Ultraviolet of the Genuine

 

POVERTY MOUNTAIN

a reference qua the epics
an evening
“coming out of my wormhole”
into the hollow
what’s good for the scurfpea
to be like the soul
crisply transpicuous

Not long ago, I discovered, thanks to the chapbook Poem Staple Collage / for Jonathan Rajewski / & Other Poem (Chicago IL: The Year, 2024) [see my review of such here], the incredible work of western Massachusetts poet HannahBrooks-Motl. Her fourth full-length title, and the first of her full-lengths I’ve seen, following The New Years (Rescue Press, 2014), M (The Song Cave, 2015) and Earth (The Song Cave, 2019), is Ultraviolet of the Genuine (The Song Cave, 2025), a book self-described as “an expansive record of time and thought, weaving together philosophy, science, theology, dreams, grief, literary theory, criticism, history, and ideas of utopia—becoming a book that continuously surprises and is nearly impossible to categorize.” “If you think words are made of poems,” she writes, as part of the extended fragment-sequence poem “POET DILEMMA,” “I mean poems made of words / As we’re taught // I know plenty of words / Though I come from the provinces / Where the earth is filled with violence [.]” There’s something remarkable in the swoop and the rush of Brooks-Motl’s lyrics, a simultaneous sense of compression and expansion, one that allows less a narrative trajectory than a sequence of thought-clusters that interconnect across every other moment and cluster across such wider expanse. “In Exeter, England one June or July,” she writes, to open the poem “EXETER,” “we slept on the floor / Rhetorically, sentimentally—I bring / this up— / not to interpret roses or be watched / by the deer on Pulpit Hill Rd. / Yes it is strange / In everyone there is a certain no one / The garden, the blankets     the poem / should be a world, a real world / Savanging the carved stone / Ymaginator / and the demi-angels now / just shapeless blobs [.]”

Across twenty-five poems, some short and some extended, Brooks-Motl clearly delights in extended meditation and play; she delights in structure, delights in how poems get built and are built, across meaning and rhythm and purpose, across avenues of articulated exploration. The strength of her poems emerge through the blend of collision and clarity, set precisely in that foundation of poems built through the building blocks of words, achieving far more than a straight line ever could. With each poem, it feels as though Brooks-Motl is slowly building something incredibly detailed and impossibly large. All of it, as she said, built out of words. “Nothing was plain or open,” begins the poem “MUTTS OF AQUINAS,” “no one / was invited to explain            Chained up all day / you might wonder:       To whom does the good accrue?”