In Love Dream With Television, Hannah Ensor wonders through the ways in which television, film, advertising, sporting events, and celebrity culture weave their ways into our lived experiences not only of the world but of ourselves: our relationships, our identity structures, our politics, our daily lived experiences of bookstores, national parks, museums, going to the gym. The body that wrote this book was stretching more, trying to breathe and look around and feel. The work finds latitude between Tucson and Iceland, in the media sphere of entertainment, in the celebrity of John Travolta and Beyoncé, and in the TV emotions born of reliability and alarm.
HANNAH ENSOR IS A POET AND ESSAYIST WORKING AROUND TOPICS OF POP CULTURE, SPORTS, QUEER TELEVISION, AND MASS MEDIA.
Hannah's first book of poetry is Love Dream With Television (Noemi Press, 2018). With Natalie Diaz they served as associate editor of Bodies Built for Game, an anthology of contemporary sports literature, and with Laura Wetherington and Jill Darling they co-wrote the collaborative poetry chapbook at the intersection of 3.
In 2019 they won the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers from Lambda Literary. Their writing has appeared in literary journals and anthologies, including the PEN Poetry Series, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, Essay Daily, JUPITER88, and Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre.
Hannah teaches courses on contemporary poetry, creative writing, and contemporary sports literature in the University of Michigan's Residential College and English Department. Until December 2017, they served as the Literary Director at the University of Arizona Poetry Center; they have also worked as an Assistant Professor (Fixed Term) of Creative Writing at Michigan State University, and at the University of Michigan as an instructor at the New England Literature Program (NELP) and as the manager of the Hopwood Awards Program.
Hannah is an editor of textsound.org, a contributing poetry editor for DIAGRAM, and has served as president of the board of directors of Casa Libre en la Solana. She has taken author portraits of 50+ poets and writers, appearing in venues such as Bookforum, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and in holdings of the LaVerne Harrell Clark Photographic Collection at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
"'The thing that got me hooked at first on breath / is how much warmer it is coming out than going in.' Coming out hot is Hannah Ensor, in 'Breath,' in thought, in humor, in 'radical compassion.' Their busy observational intake can be chilling or quotidian—tracking what the eleven Arizona electors decide to do anyway or what it looks like 'being white watching Friends'—and what they process of it and return to the world is galvanized and keen, radiant and human." - Brian Blanchfield
"In Hannah Ensor's Love Dream with Television, markers of time attach and untether, be it yesterday in 2012, today in 2015, or even just now. The work finds latitude between Tucson and Iceland, in the media sphere of entertainment, in the celebrity of John Travolta and Beyoncé, and in the TV emotions born of reliability and alarm. Anne Carson and LeBron James are equally alive for an imagination prone to experiment an embodied self in desiring flux, the meanings of being white in the US cultural arena, and the artistry of sport and spectacle able to engender a poetics: 'I keep using words as if I know / what they mean. I want my thoughts / to refuse their own habit energy, / but then it would not be habit.'" - Roberto Tejada
"Hannah Ensor writes long enough poems that you have to keep reading and ones so good I want to keep reading. They're a little sci-fi. Or maybe just true. They keep changing the subject then running it backwards so you know where you were in the middle of all these little bits and pieces of nature that flutter like a tree that actually wants to talk to you." - Eileen Myles
