This listing is for the book, candle, or broadside & is on pre-order - choose item from drop down & add to cart separately.

VOID by Hanna Tawater $18.95

Paperback book with illustrations, 110 pages

VOID is both an interactive & meditative experience, as Tawater’s poems force us to examine our own bodily selves on this earth; the space we amass, how we connect to nature through beauty & grotesqueness, & our never-ending search for knowledge amongst the dark mysteries of the universe.

“If teasing out the beauty and terror of the human search for knowledge is your thing, meet Hanna Tawater’s second collection of poetry, VOID. Tawater taps the poetic languages of quantum physics, planetary bodies, ecology, and popular psychology, locating their junctures with sharp insight and sometimes cringing self-awareness. “Being the center of an elliptic is hard work,” she asserts in a poem about blazars, before conceding “I, too, want to revel in the cataclysms.” In a monstrous portrait of depersonalization, Tawater’s speaker is “shedding, unhinged, my jawbones / loosened until both feet slide neatly through / the throat of this solipsism.” VOID is a mind-bending sprawl of a book that takes the measure of our mortal coordinates." 

-Erin Hoover, author of Barnburner and No Spare People

These handmade crafts were created with the intention of evoking the themes of Tawater’s poetry collection, VOID. Pair the candle with your book for an enhanced reading experience & frame the hagfish on your wall as a reminder to all “body horror is a defense mechanism…(from VOID)”

VOID Candle $16

The VOID candle is evocative of both the grounding bodies & mysteries of the galaxy evocative of Hanna Tawater’s poetry collection, VOID. It is terrestrial in scent with earthy & woodsy notes, & is adorned with starbursts of Gold Flecks & splashes of charcoal black holes.

Scent Notes: Fresh Earth. Patchouli. Rain Water. Cypress. Vetiver.

Adornments: Gold Flecks, Charcoal Powder

Soy Wax Candle by Marvel + Moon in a 4oz. black matte tin

HAGFISH Broadside by Hanna Tawater $12

Broadside poem, exemplary of the grotesque nature of Hanna Tawater’s poem “Hagfish” from VOID with hagfish design by Tucker Jameson.

Printed on 8.5x11” cardstock packaged in cellophane with cardboard backing.

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What other authors are saying about Tawater’s, VOID:

”The poems in Hanna Tawater’s Void are like those of the heaving, swirling celestial cosmos that warps the sea of time and space of which the poet writes. When you put this book down, you will be altered. You will question the night sky when you next look up. You will consider your hips and think of your body as nothing more than a mere curve within the grand equation of the universe. And for this you will be relieved. Each poem in this collection is “a swelling momentum, a quickening between becoming bigger” than the last. What Tawater gives us is a gift—a reminder of our own quiet smallness though these poems are anything but small. This book is for those hungry readers who desire to be sucked into another dimension as their mind travels through theories of black holes, antimatter, the zodiac, Greek myth, subterranean telescopes, and Mongolian death worms all under the “glorious compound” of imaginative, interplanetary language. Read this book and you will be transported.”

-Trista Edwards, author of Spectral Evidence

"The phenomena of the universe are difficult to describe, but the poems in VOID know that space is personal, embodied and gendered. Even black holes contend with our stories. When Galillo named Jupiter’s satellites, he called one Io, because the thought of a woman turned cow forever orbiting her abuser as a moon just felt like the right kind of metaphor. “We can go to the most remote places on the planet and still be burdened by semi-automatic euphemisms,” Tawater writes. We can, we are. Meanwhile, these poems give us language for parsing and transforming these painful, everyday obfuscations."

-K. Lorraine Graham, author of The Rest Is Censored

“We drove through the desert while Jupiter was entering Sagittarius and I finally felt alive for fucking once”—alive with a sense of place, a sense of space, the poems in Hanna Tawater’s confident second collection VOID navigate from the stars to Southern California, Mongolian death worms to event horizons, intimate family history to the ecosystem of a sloth’s fur. In tones both journalistic—“Do girls exist if not looked at”—and playful—“ what do you even know of moons /  before they are turned to cows / white or yellow or spotted and orbiting”—Tawater’s poems meditate on questions of mental health and chronic pain, a woman’s relationship with the world around her, and the mysteries of the galaxy we inhabit. Unflinching, direct, and with surprising joy, the poems and prose journey “through space, reality, backlit and beautiful”—take the ride, reader. You won’t regret it.”

-Jenny Minniti-Shippey, author of After the Tour 

“When I read Hanna Tawater’s thrilling poems, I feel like my eyes travel to what is infinitely distant and then back to what is infinitely small. I am blasted in “a beam of ionized matter,” as it says in her poem “TXS 0506+056,” down to the subterranean core, in “Ghost Neutrino.” Antimatter, time crystals, ghost towns, and alien megastructures populate this innovative new work from an electrifying talent.”

-Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, author of The Book of Kane and Margaret

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HANNA TAWATER

Hanna Tawater is the author of the poetry collections VOID (White Stag, 2022) and Reptilia (Ayahuasca, 2018). She completed her MFA in writing, with focus on interdisciplinary poetry, at UC San Diego. Her work has appeared in various publications, both online and in print. She teaches interdisciplinary and multigenre writing in San Diego, where she lives with entirely too many cats.