Hanna Gamble Featured in Chicago Tribune

Here's a nice write-up on Hannah Gamble, author of National Poetry Series selection Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast.

A sample:

Generally, "Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast" explores family dynamics and social norms. It's intensely dramatic and hilariously comic. The poems shift from being semi-autobiographical to completely absurdist to meditating on the work of other poets Gamble admires.

"(Hannah's) poems enact great emotional complexity inside lucid rhetorical structures," said Rebecca Wolff, editor of Fence Books. "My favorite thing about Hannah's poems is how worried they are, how ecstatically they do their worrying."

Gamble studied poetry in high school but, like most teenagers, found it difficult to connect to the outdated language of many old poems. In college, she joined a poetry workshop on a whim.

It was there that she first read contemporary poets such as Mark Strand, James Tate and John Berryman.

"For the first time, I was crazy for poetry," Gamble said. "Before that I hadn't encountered anything besides Radiohead and (Franz) Kafka that made me feel like I couldn't breathe normally. That was so exciting."

Even at such an introductory stage, the professor of the workshop, Richard Jackson, saw something in Gamble: "She had an incredible optimism and enthusiasm, an intellectual curiosity that saw the wonder in everything."

Full article here.