Hawk & Moon, by Han VanderHart

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Hawk & Moon is a collection of intimate attachment, orbiting the images of the hawk and the moon as it circles human desire, the phases of the moon, and the haiku form. Like the haiku poets, ordinary life and its images are essential to these poems: the “braids floating / down the road / in late summer,” the meal moths flying out of the pantry, the ripe blackberry and “the flower before it…the thorn after.”

Examining ego and poetry-making, Iris Murdoch’s philosophy and the fantasy of the self, the poems in Hawk & Moon embrace the human condition of being moon-touched, open themselves up to wrongness, to confession, to love songs for child, brother, and lover. Whether listening to a barking dog or watching the hawks fight in the loblolly pine trees above the house, the lyric of these poems is rooted deeply in the dramatic local and the observing heart.

Han VanderHart is a queer writer living in Durham, North Carolina, under the pines. Their second poetry collection, Larks (Ohio University Press, 2025), was selected by Chanda Feldman as winner of the 2024 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Han is also the author of What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021) and has essays and poetry published in Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, AGNI, and elsewhere. Han hosts Of Poetry Podcast and, alongside Amorak Huey, co-edits the poetry press River River Books.