Hannah Bonner’s Another Woman (Eastover Press, 2024) is a cutting surprise of a collection that explores the emotional stakes of a woman’s relationships. With acerbic and spare language that circles in on itself, Bonner instructs her readers to live in her body and experience these moments with both an intimacy and a distance that, as the poems collect, become heavy with grief.
Bonner’s poems begin in the body. Her collection, while perhaps easily categorized as a break-up narrative or a catalog from “the other woman,” functions as a snapshot of life as a human animal. Bonner is certainly employing some wordplay in the title (and titular poem) — Another Woman interacts with the idea of the other woman — since many of the poems deal explicitly with an extramarital affair, but I think she is also playing with the idea of “woman,” and with whomever else she may share space or identity. In the title piece she says, “I wait for night / to turn over within me. // Then another woman / walks out of the space // where I have been.”
These poems are so sparse, pared down as close to the quick as a poem can get, that it is difficult to excerpt without sharing whole poems. Some poems are only a few lines long and ask the reader to fill in the flesh along their skeletons. But Bonner doesn’t fall into the tropes of “Instagram poetry” in her brevity. Instead, her poems, while short and accessible, build a scaffolding for a greater narrative. A whole message may be transmitted in just a few lines, but these shortest of her poems nudge the reader to come closer.
Bonner’s language is quick and deft and sexual; she weaves repeating images of deer, night time and seasons with repeated themes of hunger and heartache that enriches the way these poems interact with one another. A little over halfway through the book, the poem “To The Bone” calls to deer, a stream, a meadow, moonlight and sex. In my favorite passage from this poem she says “Not the blade on the bath / I walk away from, // skin parting air / like rain. Not the wet // want inside me which whispers / spring is coming, cupped low and mulched at my ear.”
There is a poem that discusses the body as a political object (“My Body Is Not Your Politics”), an interrogation of the culture millennials grew up with (“The Year I Was Born”), and poems of recovery and survival after loss (“too many to name”). Desire, love and loss are at the center of this collection, but it is not a dialogue between two lovers. Instead, the collection explores the speaker’s place in her own life, within or outside this one relationship.
Bonner innovates in every sentence, subverting my expectations on a word-by-word basis in lines like these: “a shaft of skin / sacrament, / strange country” “you fevered through me” “a clemency of wild air” “A water so febrile it’s almost fire.” What draws me to Bonner and what will have me revisiting this collection again and again is her language.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s September 2024 issue.
Related upcoming event
Another Woman Experimental Shorts
FilmScene | Thu, Sept. 12, 7 p.m. | $10
Positioned in conversation with Iowa City writer Hannah Bonner’s book of poetry of the same name, Another Woman is a program of experimental shorts that explore the traces, absences and embodiment of women onscreen.
