Déjà Vu by Laura L. Hansen

Laura Hansen‘s poems are familiar to me in the intimate, hushed way that a walk through the pine forest of my childhood is familiar, the way that the soap and warm water and sponge of dishwashing is familiar, the way that the scent of a lover’s t-shirt is familiar. Writing through the prism of middle age, ordinary experiences and observations –herons by a lake, a storm at night, a visit to a fast food restaurant– become, in Hansen’s beautifully observant words, extraordinary, fragile, things to be cherished even as they turn, in the moment, to memory. While many of the poems in Deja Vu are solitary poems, written from a deeply reflective place, Hansen, like Mary Oliver, has a rare ability to create human connection through the solitude of nature. Poem by poem, she opens her fierce and tender heart to the reader. Deja Vu is a lovely book.

–Alison McGhee, New York Times bestselling author and professor of Creative Writing at Metropolitan State University

Laura Hansen’s wonderful new collection, Déjà Vu, covers a lot of territory for a chapbook, from honeybees and hummingbirds to forest fires in Canada and cold-blooded murders in her home town. These are generous and mature poems, honest assessments of relationships with one’s self and others.  Laura isn’t afraid of the dark, but she never leaves us out there alone: “We shared a cup of sky before bed,” she says, and “paddled our way halfway to the moon.”

–Joyce Sutphen, Minnesota’s Poet Laureate and is a professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College

“I could be all day praising this fine [] volume.” … “Déjà Vu contains poems of a quiet life, which is not to say nothing happens in them. These poems are full of careful observation, of the beauties and terrors of nature and human life. They also contain lost love, the perils and consolations of memory, the process of aging, some splendid Midwestern thunderstorms, and at least one murder. They bring the reader inside the intense mind-world of those to whom “the sacred comes to us/in our solitude, in the brush of tree bark/under our hands, in the soft way the sun/cups the star-studded Potentilla/in the fast food parking lot. /Yes. Even there.”

–Edith Rylander, Columnist, Essayist and Poet, Dance with the Darker Sister, Wrestling with the Angel, Hive Dancer

“This latest group of Laura Hansen‘s poems, ‘Deja Vu,’ continues with a sustained embrace of nature in which she searches out the metaphysical much as Emily Dickinson did, looking intensely for answers to life in the trees, sky, grass, rivers, birds, people and herself. The poems delve much deeper than ever before into questions which are almost unanswerable. Her poems offer revelations both for the author and the reader. ‘Deja Vu’ is an illuminating journey well worth taking.”

–Tom McKeown, Poet