Julie Hanson is coordinator of a food-buying cooperative in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; she holds an M.A. in expository writing and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Iowa. Her work has earned awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the West Chester University Conference on Narrative and Form, and the Cincinnati Review and has been published in such venues as the Michigan Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Iowa Review, Volt, Poetry East, Tampa Review, and Booth.

Books by Julie Hanson:

Other poems on the web by Julie Hanson:
"They are Widening the Road"
"Cold Cereal and Milk at 3 A.M."
"Pull-down Attic Stairs"

About Unbeknownst:

"Julie Hanson’s poems are so winningly direct, so deft in tuning and alert in movement, that you only half-notice how beautifully oblique they are—‘the ways around / a thing unsaid are myriad / and free’—and how entrancing. Until you look up at the end, a little surprised at how far you’ve been carried in a few moments, at how much you’ve been . . . not exactly told but shown how to feel."
—James Richardson

"A wry eye and a keen sense of the actual rule this delightful collection. In a sincere and compassionate attempt to get at the undertones of daily life, Hanson looks and speaks frankly about the intimate, the private, the deep insides of act and feeling. This is a book that uses thought as a microscope to reveal intricacies that open onto new intricacies—the kind of book you look up from to find your own life richer, reverberating."
—Cole Swensen

"’To encapsulate the unattainable,’ part of the title of the final poem in Unbeknownst, is a good description of the task Julie Hanson’s poems set themselves. With patient and ingenious variation, Hanson’s poetry sifts and cleans and weeds and redeems such hard-to-pin-down processes as thinking, reading, dreaming, and conversing—in other words, living. Grounded in the quotidian and with a fine ear for vernacular (as in the wonderful ‘Grab the Far End’), Hanson is nevertheless an explorer of the transcendent."
—Rachel Hadas

"The poems in Julie Hanson’s delightful Unbeknownst are natural and shapely, with a subtle architecture that you inhabit all the more fully because you hardly notice it. Their language is relaxed and exact, pervaded by an understated and touching humor, and yet the poems hover on the edge of mystery, the mystery of thought. They move in directions that are surprising and unpredictable but that in retrospect seem inevitable, as you ‘slowly make out the shape / of all of this, which is to think.’ Unbeknownst is a masterful and moving book."
—John Koethe