“In Softly Undercover, lyric’s devotional mode is both thrall and throe: the powerlessness and pain of being in relation to a higher power, of being ‘a constant / hostage to mystery.’ These masterful poems make stringent, witty music. ‘Three times removed / from any grip on home,’ Hanae Jonas writes, ‘which place is the real life?’ Instead of answers, the stark beauty of these lyrics offers just enough succor to sustain the ardent devotion of us, ‘the earthly alone.’” —Brian Teare
“Language itself is the protagonist in these spell-woven poems, simultaneously soliciting and fending off the sharp outlines we mistake for understanding. ‘I’m coming down with morning,’ says their speaker, as though it were an illness. Hanae Jonas is after nothing less than the springs of consciousness here and firmly turns her back on paraphrasables. A bold and absorbing debut.” —Linda Gregerson
“Softly Undercover is a stunning collection that carefully shapes isolation, sorrow, fracture, and uncertainty into original imagery and sonic nuance, inducing a breathlessness with its candid, valiant pauses and admissions. It casts society’s procedures and the haunted flourishes of the soul in remarkable light.” —Marcus Jackson, Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize judge
From its opening insistence on “not love but procedure,” Hanae Jonas’s Softly Undercover explores the possibilities and limitations of ritual and repetition, asking what it means to believe and see clearly. Formally rangy poems map out territories of devotion and divination, contrasting the realm of mystery, dreams, and symbols with the alienation of the mundane. Against a backdrop of intimate relationships, small towns, rural landscapes, and claustrophobic interiors, Jonas casts her gaze on isolation, nostalgia, repression, visibility, and loss while examining the desire “to go anywhere more docile / than facts.” Animated by uncertainty, this elliptical and lyrical debut dwells in the pleasures and hazards of illusion.
Hanae Jonas is the author of the chapbook Lowlands. She was born in Vermont and lives in Los Angeles.
Contents
Rhododendrons
The View
Ritual for Spelling Silence
Bluff Line
Apparent Threshold
Lowlands
As Above
Aubade
Denials
Then the Night in Me Woke Up
Luminous Crisis
Homing
Good
Ritual in the Aftermath
Dead Lexicon
Cursory Details
What Beauty
With Stones as Their Witness
Private Party
Everything That Acts Is Actual
Version with Sudden End
Against Ritual
Venus Retrograde
Lupines
Künstlerroman
Body of Evidence
Stinging Nettle
The Glow
Dusk
Ritual for a Back Room
Imagining a Forest by the Sea
Delinquents
It Says Nothing
Imagining a Forest by the Sea
Acknowledgments
Notes
