Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 86
ISBN: 9781781726471
Publication date: March 28, 2022
Price: £9.99
Winner of Wordsworth Prize for Literature & Poetry at Lakeland Book of the Year 2023
Longlisted for the Barbellion Prize
Highly Commended in the Forward Prize
“Hannah Hodgson takes us to the paradoxical heart of poetry itself: to be held inside a pain both intensified and soothed by the sheer brilliant presence of the poet’s mind.” – Caroline Bird
Hannah Hodgon is an award-winning poet and a palliative care patient. In her compelling debut collection 163 Days, she uses a panoply of medical, legal, and personal vocabularies to explore what illness, death and dying does to a person as both patient and witness.
163 Days is the length of Hannah’s longest period of hospitalisation to date. In this long poem, she probes various truths, personal and medical; truths which clash like a tray of dropped instruments in a silent operating theatre. The speaker is a teenager on the cusp of adulthood. Doctors struggle to diagnose her complex conditions. Through daily, diary-like poems we see the children’s ward through Hannah’s eyes. It is decked out in primary colours. Volunteer clowns visit. At seventeen she is ‘too old’ to be here, ‘too young’ to move to the adult ward.
The mundanity of hospital life is marbled by a changing landscape of mood, hope and loss. Her symptoms are painful. She has numerous tests and procedures to keep her alive long enough to figure out what’s wrong. A gap yawns between the person she is, and the person in her medical notes.
In ‘Aftercare’, Hannah navigates the worlds of both nightclubs and hospice care as she embarks on a new version of her life as a disabled adult. 163 Days is an important collection, in which Hodgson’s true voice takes poetry into difficult places.
Hannah Hodgson
Hannah Hodgson is a writer living with a life limiting illness. Her work has been published by BBC Arts, The Poetry Review, Magma, and Mslexia, amongst others. Her first collection, 163 Days, was published by Seren in March 2022. The collection has been highly commended in the 2022 Forward Prize and was adapted for BBC Sounds. She won the 2021 Poetry Business New Poets Prize; as well as Northern Writers Award’s for Poetry in both 2020 and 2022. She has three pamphlets, Dear Body (Wayleave, 2018), Where I’d Watch Plastic Trees Not Grow (Verve Poetry Press) and Queen of Hearts (Poetry Business). She writes extensively about her experiences as a seriously unwell person, and also regularly works alongside organisations such as NHS England and charities like Hospice UK to try and close gaps into which she has fallen. She received a prestigious Diana Legacy Award (given in memory of Diana, Princess of Wales) in 2021; only 20 are given worldwide every 2 years for Humanitarian and Social Action Work. Hannah has worked widely in radio (appearing on Radio 3,4, and 5), and has also authored a graphic novella contained within Breakthrough: Our Time (2021, Soaring Penguin Press).
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The side effects of this collection will linger long after you turn the final pages, re-awakening questions around the mind, body, spirit, and human mortality. 163 Days may depict a fragile body, but it brings to life the voice of a truly gifted, bold, and gritty poet, who more than succeeds in weaving creativity with the bare bones of reality.”
Kay Channon, Disability Arts Online
“What stands out in this remarkable collection is the determination of the author… Hannah finds beautiful imagery to describe the inner turmoil of the seriously ill, and sets it effectively against the scientific, objective language of the medical professions. She takes us into the recesses of our nightmares and brings us back to consciousness with power derived from facing suffering, and coming through the other side. It is a plea for emotional intelligence. Highly recommended.”
Rennie Halstead, London Grip
“A collection full of life and humour. There are difficult subjects but the poet’s craft and expertise carry the poems and the reader… fine examples of a poet pushing boundaries, her poems bringing us to places we didn’t know we needed to go.”
Caroline Bracken, Nation.Cymru
“Hannah Hodgson’s harrowing collection is the opposite of a forgetting… Hodgson’s visceral connection with the demands of her body is laid bare in an enactment of her own suffering, as though… the painful rendering of truth might transfigure pain into a new purpose… The subtle strength of 163 Days is made tensile by the uncommon tenure of Hannah Hodgson’s experience, and harvested in poems that give definition to a complete refocusing of perception.”
The Yorkshire Times
Listen to the BBC radio play adaptation of 163 Days on the New Creatives website.
