Ultraviolet of the Genuine by Hannah Brooks Motl

*Publication date is March 11th!*

*Preorders will begin in February*

Hannah Brooks-Motl’s fourth collection of poems, Ultraviolet of the Genuine, is an expansive record of time and thought, weaving together philosophy, science, theology, dreams, grief, literary theory, criticism, history, and ideas of utopia—becoming a book that continuously surprises and is nearly impossible to categorize. Engaging with centuries of poetic tradition, Ultraviolet of the Genuine leaves room for the development of everything, abstract and alive, even giving ants the spotlight in one long poem. These poems propose a new metaphysics, weighing everyday moments wherein the elusive and ultraviolet radiate. Again, Brooks-Motl challenges the ways we read poetry, not by opting for either the head or the heart, but by choosing both.

“[T]he poem / should be a world, a real world” writes Brooks-Motl. Ultraviolet of the
Genuine is a thrilling poetic search for utopian ants under real rocks. Brooks-Motl’s
poems snake from “mouth to anus” through a python of philosophical and aesthetic
questions in her attempt to grapple with the allure and limits of “ecstatic personal
austerities.” This is intellectual poetry of the highest order bent on bringing us the news
from nowhere. —Jennifer Moxley

The spirit of utopia lives on in Hannah Brooks-Motl’s luminous new collection, Ultraviolet of the Genuine: through its linguistic eclecticism, radiant intelligence, and homespun rebellion against everything given. In poems that know “nowhere’s exactly perfection,” Brooks-Motl takes us directly and slantwise to the middle of everywhere: to “the woods / where fait waits,” up the mountain again to have “a dutiful dialogue / with fallen leaves,” home with its bowl of fruit “like an image of utopia”–tracing the meanders and spirals of desire paths made by a mind alert and alerting. With her fourth collection, Brooks-Motl proves herself not only among this generation’s truly singular poets, but also one of its most philosophical. Hers are excitingly philosophical poems that think with the whole body, dancing to the music of thought and feeling for “the vaster partaking of anything that is.” Every poem here is a momentary stay against the artificial, an insistence on the authority of our hopes, imagination, desires, and anticipations. Separately and singly, they essay to locate the paradoxes of joy amid the wilderness of life. I have happily roamed the woods of these words for days, tracking traces of elegy, analysis, dream, finding much nourishment, company, and countless small wonders “sufficient to all”–and I’ll keep returning for years to come because Ultraviolet of the Genuine shows me new possibilities for what poems can be, what language can do. —Hai-Dang Phan

 It starts with blueberries and it ends with quartz and heaven. In between it’s all reeling from tender adventure, cutting a path through bird cannons and scurfpea. Our poet has a literary injury. She attends to the ants, to the ticks and the weeds. Goethe said that blue shadows on snow are a demanded colour, produced by the eye itself. Somewhere Marianne Moore swishes her cape, tilts her tricorner cap, stares directly at the sun. It’s a mortal world, and we know after all that what looks like a vase can also be an urn. Mystic concentration/lyric dispersal: Hannah Brooks-Motl makes a serious book. —Luke Roberts

Hannah Brooks-Motl was born and raised in Wisconsin. She is author of the poetry collections The New Years (2014), M (2015), Earth (2019), and Ultraviolet of the Genuine (2025), as well as chapbooks from the Song Cave, arrow as aarow, and The Year. She lives in western Massachusetts.