David Hanlon – Dawn’s Incision Poems

NOW AVAILABLE FROM OUR PRESS BOOKSHOP!
A COMPLEX 1ST FULL-LENGTH COLLECTION

David Hanlon’s Dawn’s Incision

Notes on Dawn’s Incision

David’s book involves a deep journey into the self composed as a set of poetic motifs exploring love, its loss, and personal renewal, through its intricate prismatic lens on nature, self-ecosystems, the interior heart, the domestic and feral spaces in which we meet, engage, love, communicate, lose sight of connection, and curl inwards in grief and self-interrogation, in the attempt to re-emerge, altered but buoyed up into new healing modalities.

In David’s book and life this all takes place in the context of queer love and LGBTQA identity, the poems as a work constituting a strength of naming of experience in the face of underlying, perhaps unspoken contexts of socio-political and cultural dimensions of freedom and struggle against ongoing heteronormative oppressions. It is a veiled semantic of overcoming, subtle, a beautiful composed set of suites of interconnected poems, from an overture Intro section, that is like a quick traversal through the arc of its voice, to a group of numbered sections, fragmented and wondrous shards, where accounts of first meetings, nights out, lust, desire, love, engagements, travels, daily life, the loss of the other, the return, gradually to a new self in the aftermath of pain, searching and grief are articulated with grace and a powerful, delicate voice.

As editor, I encouraged David to continue working on what was originally a short manuscript, to expand it through exploring the ways in which a sense of fissures and kaleidoscopic views in the narrative, could be more fully expanded inside the book through a corresponding fragmentation of the layout, positionality of the poems, their crystalline shape and repeating motifs set into intuitive patterns, outward and deeply interior.

The cover I designed, chosen from an original photo by Sophie West, was another key or clue into the choice of pursuing a deconstruction of a beginning-middle-end story into one more ‘incisive’, as is the title of David’s collection. Visually, textually-ruminative correlates throughout create a book-work; a beautiful, fractured cover collage with its elation and melancholy, echo and refract the narrative within the book’s own arc. The goal was to create a lot of space around each element in the text, so that the book as a whole and each separate poem within, can be read in any fashion – beginning-to-end, as fragments inside poems; end-to-beginning, or a random drift in-and-out of sections, as I do now as I read and reread David’s magnificent achievement enjoying each phrase in the world of its larger weave.

Copies of this contemplative, lyrical queer masterpiece of precise poetics, exploring love, loneliness, desire, eco-poetics, interiority, space, abjection, renewal and object silence, are now available from Ice Floe Press. A full-length book of poems, Dawn’s Incision is 112 pgs.

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Advance Praise:

‘David Hanlon’s Dawn’s Incision is a profound exploration of common humanity. Head first, he takes on love, loss, and a deep sense of longing. Each poem in this collection expertly blends vivid imagery with emotional resonance, and invites readers to a space where the ordinary becomes the extraordinary.

Hanlon’s precise use of language and metaphor guides us through the intricate territories of the heart and mind, revealing the beauty and pain inherent in our connections with others and ourselves. Dawn’s Incision goes beyond the initial experience of reading; these are poems that echo.

For readers dealing with the depths of human emotions this collection will help you emerge with a refreshed understanding of how to live. A must-read. A remarkable gift from a poet who gets better with every poem I read.’

– Alan Parry, Editor-in-Chief of The Broken Spine, and author of Neon Ghosts, Echoes, and Twenty Seven.

excerpt from LUMP

I want to cough

you up spit

you out

Instead I wait

in the silence

David Hanlon is a Björk-loving confessional poet from Cardiff, Wales. His work explores themes of queerness, toxic masculinity, mental health, loss and change. Aside from poetry, he is inspired by art cinema, alternative music, nature and existentialism. He is a Best of the Net nominee and Co-Poetry Editor at Broken Spine Arts.

You can find his work online in over 90 magazines, including Rust & Moth, Barren Magazine, The Lumiere Review and trampset. His first chapbook Spectrum of Flight is available at Animal Heart Press. You can follow him on twitter @davidhanlon13 and Instagram @hanlon6944.

AN ICE FLOE PRESS PRODUCTION (c) 2024.
Cover Design: Robert Frede Kenter. Editing: Robert Frede Kenter & Moira J. Saucer.

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