Who Owns What Here?

A wise adage tells us that not all who wander are lost. Who Owns What Here? weaves a golden thread through country fields, brackish creeks, and neon bars, knitting a precious and wild loneliness that only Hahn can. One gets the sense that these poems, like Sitka fish in a net, had simply been wriggling against the ropes until Hahn's deft hand sliced them free. Few writers move so precisely and with such urgency. This is smart, joyful poetry. It reminds: we can be our own talismans in this aching, large life-even when the pain passed down persists.

- Alexa Poteet

Author, Carnivores

Shenan Hahn's work sashays lyrically from the earth daughter, wet and wild, in her opening poem, "We Daughters," to the mystical memories of "Billie Golden," a poem that begins with an obituary. There's even a short short story about Wanda Thorpe, "The Rockabilly Queen of Alaska," who "saws open the belly of a fish" to songs like "Crying" or "Squeeze Me Just a Little." Who Owns What Here? is an earthy collection-not snarky and citified-larded with descriptions of air, water, smoke, and music.

- Nancy S. Bishop

Arts Critic and Publisher, Third Coast Review

"We hear our own voice," Hahn writes in a sestina, and in these poems with their dazzling imagery and deep connections to the natural world, we not only hear ourselves, but we also discover ourselves in all our emotional nakedness and longing. "Nothing shrinks from the salt, the wind, or the freeze," nor does Hahn ever shrink from laying bare our deepest selves with all our longings, fears, and those little events that become "omens" and "the inbred instructions / for assembling oneself," instructions that Hahn delivers through the rhythms and music of her verse. She examines the intricacies of relationship as easily as she extolls the many ways in which nature calls us, all the time using a variety of poetic techniques that reveal her wide-ranging mastery.

- Edward Perlman

Publisher and Senior Editor, Entasis Press