Julie Hanson, “Cold Cereal and Milk at 3 A.M.”

What can make something so simple taste so good,
so indulgent? What have I done, and what have I not,
what have I said, what have I sent that comes back now,
willed or misapplied, in a boomerang of harm?

This is a time of holding in the mouth, of chewing slowly
even these softened squares. The body is comforted by this
as it has been by the remembered scent of those I have loved
who are far and gone from me and dead. Brought close
with their completed lives, they seem to have known me wholly.

Even this wheat-sweetened milk is delicious. And when one
sunken piece turns up—a surprise ending—its gray ghost
stirred and revealed, a small celebration takes place then,
under the ribbed ceiling, near the back of the gums.

Julie Hanson’s Unbeknownst is a winner of the 2010 Iowa Poetry Prize. (Yesterday, we featured the other winner, L.S. Klatt’s Cloud of Ink.) The collection also includes “Allocation” (published in Terrain.org) and “Remedial Weeding” (originally published in The Cincinnati Review).

Of Unbeknownst, University of Iowa Press editor Holly Carver has said, “I’ve been working with these Poetry Prize books for 20-some years, and to my mind, her [manuscript] was one of the freshest and brightest books that we’ve ever published. It just seemed to have an honesty and an accessibility that made it really stand above a lot of other really good, cleverly crafted poems that maybe didn’t ring quite as true.”

5 April 2011 | poetry |