Wren Hanks
Poet & Essayist
Winner of Driftwood’s The Adrift Chapbook Contest (2020)
Finalist for:
Omnidawn’s Poetry Chapbook Contest (2020)
Quarterly West’s Poetry Chapbook Contest (2020)
DIAGRAM’s Poetry Chapbook Contest (2019)
Praise for Lily-livered:
“‘On Earth, a fish barricades her den / and emerges male two months later, / melon-head worthy of brawling and teeth,’ announces one of the brilliant sectioned poems central to Lily-livered. ‘On Mars, the sunset is blue. / She asks me about this second life / of red dirt, burnt skin. What do you enjoy // about being a man?’ Although framed by a series of ‘transiversaries,’ to describe this collection in diaristic terms would not do justice to the overlay of questions raised around gender, beauty, diet, desire, violence, medication and self-medication…. This is a stunning read that showcases a sophisticated, exciting approach to contemporary poetics.”
-Sandra Beasley, Count the Waves
“Cyclical and dreamy, yet sinewy, Wren Hanks’ Lily-livered is a record of the hungers—for food, for sex, for alcohol—that simultaneously tie us to and alienate us from our bodies. Though a site of suffering and addiction, the physical in Lily-livered is also a conduit for pleasure, connection, and transformation, where ‘a girl prayed let me be sea / and ended up a man.’ Lily-livered portrays embodied living in all its ambivalent, bloody glory, while summoning the tenderness to ‘cradle everyone I cannot save, myself included.’ Hanks wakes us up to the sublime, precarious selves housed in these strange, disgusting, beautiful bodies—and you will feel more alive for having read it.”
-Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, Look Alive
“Lily-livered is a beautifully braided catalog of ways to live and not die. Wren Hanks writes on friendship, hunger, touch, transformation, and the inheritance of a trait for which the chapbook is named. ‘Imagine it happened in a barn, a meat cellar.’ These poems unfurl as an array of forms, forms of life, with sensuous patterns and particulars. With ‘stubble the possible field,’ Hanks breathes lines that combine ribaldry, romance, and refrain into stunning, surprising images and interconnections. This is a smart, moving collection that you will love reading alone or with friends. ‘The ground is safe.’ ”
-Oliver Baez Bendorf, Advantages of Being Evergreen
About The Rise of Genderqueer:
“We are witnessing the birth of an extraordinary voice in these poems.”
—Roy G. Guzmán, author of Restored Mural for Orlando
A truly incomparable collection, The Rise of Genderqueer constructs a voice with unmitigated and authentic yearning. Its poems soak ink into page from margin to margin, pressing into the reader’s assumptions about gender unmercifully. These poems demand, carry authentic wisdom, deliver keen argument, and disarm with sly wit. Wren Hanks challenges the status quo as neatly as a flower slid into the barrel of a rifle. These are utterly convincing prose forms studded with rhetoric he’s deftly remastered and sampled from our culture and conversations right now.
“I’ll never be denatured, // I am nature,” Hanks’s poems insist, as the reader bears witness to a bigger world, light flooding into every corner, revealing what has always been true, vigorous, and expansive.