Romanticization of Grief and Ghosts, Reviewed by Eric Baker

Annalisa Hansford (they/them) is the author of Romanticization of Grief and Ghosts (Bottlecap Press 2025). Their poetry has received honors from Academy of American Poets and 1455 Literary Arts. They studied poetry with Gabrielle Calvocoressi at the 2024 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. They intern at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop in Cambridge where one of their favorite poets, Frank O’Hara, used to frequent. They love the colors mint blue and army green, Frank Sinatra, and mailing postcards to strangers.

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Part confession, part elegy, part exorcism–Annalisa Hansford’s Romanticization of Grief and Ghosts is an electric debut exploring desire, loss, and how trauma’s impact on the body can shape one's perception of the world they inhabit. Traversing settings from pastoral scenes to the passenger seat of a mother’s car, Hansford’s (anti-)love poems seek not to heal, nor mend, the wound. Rather, these poems dive right into the speaker’s hurt, considering ways in which memories and personal trauma accumulate in the body and how poetry can offer the possibility of a world, or worlds, where reminders of the past don’t exist. 

Abecedarian for My Future Lover, the chapbook’s second poem, follows a speaker fighting the flow of time and the inevitable heartbreak awaiting them and their beloved. Hansford makes good use of Romanticism and its tropes, all while working within an unapologetically queer, contemporary, and fresh poetics– using poetry to transform the world around the speaker into a reflection of their innermost passions and wants. Early in the poem, Hansford writes: “For you, I would gash the New / England clouds from the sky. A trinket for your bedside table. A / fragment of my longing.” Here we see the speaker in an act of religious devotion to their beloved, decimating the sublime New England setting and constructing with erotic violence a love-token that only illustrates a fraction of their desire. Part of what makes Hansford’s lines sing is their attention to form and syntax. With subtle line-breaks, as well as consistent parataxis across the poem’s lines, Hansford wrestles with the prospect of newfound love and its eventual end–taking a knife, not only to the New England autumnal sky, but to the rush of falling in love with someone new, and to Time itself. 

It is within the poetic occasion that the speaker(s) of Romanticization of Grief and Ghosts is able to achieve agency over trauma, cleaving themselves both from the grip of their memories, as well as from the grip of their abuser. Hansford writes in poem in which you can’t hurt me: “in this poem, there is no reminder of the / parts of me you sliced open like a lab / experiment. like a dead animal / being dissected. in this poem, i don’t / need to unbandage my wounds / to be believed. the world sees you holding / the blade. in this poem, i stitch myself…” Through the act of poetry, the speaker is able to both free themself from the urge to explain their trauma, and in turn take the risk that their truth will be disregarded. Instead, the speaker is able to begin taking steps toward self-vindication, holding accountable the unnamed driver of the poem’s abuse. The poem does not end with some sort of blind catharsis–this knife belonging to the “you” does not disappear or go away. As we reach our final couplet, the knife finally belongs to the speaker, the abuser’s memory now capable of being washed away. 

A haunting first collection, Romanticization of Grief and Ghosts, viscerally grapples with love, loss and the fallout of abuse with honest, provocative lyricism as well as formal precision, and is a must read for anyone concerned with thinking about how memories live on in, and beyond, the body.

Romanticization of Grief and Ghosts by Annalisa Hansford can be purchased here:

https://bottlecap.press/products/romanticization

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Eric Baker (he/him) is a Korean American writer from New York City, currently living in the Washington D.C. area, where he studies and teaches at the University of Maryland, College Park. His work explores themes of diasporic identity, loss and intergenerational trauma. When he's not making, he's usually busy walking his dog, wandering around the NGA or catching a screening at Suns.