Anna Maria Hong is a lyrical spellcaster enticing the reader to spiral down the rabbit hole of her extraordinary mind. Whether she’s composing coiling sonnets, or writing about termites and vultures for her next collection Fablesque, or acting as heir to the late, great Angela Carter and crafting a revisionist, feminist fairytale of “Hansel and Gretel,” Hong is a writer of vision and rupture. In her book Age of Glass, which took 14 years to create, she refashions the sonnet, weirding it up, unfastening it from drained constraints when necessary, until her sonnets are “pulsing the next iteration.” And, in her previously mentioned forthcoming book Fablesque from Tupelo Press, her poems continue to radiate rage and agency as well as wit and a remarkable sense of the symphonic. Presented here in her poem “Ouranus” (the Greek god who fathered the one-eyed giants/ Kyklopes , the hundred-handed giants/Hekatonkheires, and the god of time/Kronos, who is referenced in the poem), Hong demonstrates her deft and dense sonic latticework as she fluidly pivots from rhyme to rhyme: “progression / cast as patricide / the past at last / perfected: cut / and met by that primordial wet net.” In Hong’s mythic unfurlings, not only can you hear the music, you can feel the bite marks of measure and time.
Read “Ouranus” by Anna Maria Hong >>