Sarah Hannah's final collection, Inflorescence, does what all well-named books do: it uses its title to suggest what's ahead. In this case, readers are met with definition: "inflorescence" suggests the act of flowering. This intimates a poetic bildungsroman, and in many ways, that sort of coming-of-age narrative is what emerges in the volume, which chronicles one woman's developing role as daughter, caregiver, and survivor of a mentally and, increasingly, physically ill mother.
A description such as the above suggests victimization, and Hannah's collection does contain a few such moments. In "Earliest Memory," the speaker watches her mother, saying, "I already knew not to wake her." But the strength of this volume is its refusal to simplify the mother/daughter relationship by only casting blame or dichotomizing the characters. Here, terms like good and bad become almost irrelevant, complicated as they are by Hannah's minute attention to the intricacies of relationship. With statements such as "A pregnant woman can't afford to laugh off / Superstition" and "[the notary] will ask the mother's / Occupation, and when she tells him artist, / He'll type housewife" the narrator reminds readers of the perils of maternity. Thus, the narrative that emerges is dual, tracing both the mother who fails and the daughter who responds to the failure.
More than a memoir, however, Inflorescence proves also to be a study of the natural world and its forms. A variant definition of the title refers to the arrangement of blooms on a stalk or axis, and this attention to form permeates Hannah’s volume. The poems themselves, whether comprised of couplets or columns, litanies or lists, reflect the work of a talented poet with an ear for language and a concern for the arrangement of things. This concern permeates the poems’ content as well, where the speaker’s attention to order arises from her role as witness to the chaotic deterioration of disease. In the doctor’s office, the mother struggles to name herbs from her garden; in a safe house, the daughter counts the buttons on her corset, finding comfort in chronicling the certain and the constant.
Safe houses, of course, are temporary by nature, and Hannah ends the volume not in such fleeting security but on a different note, referencing Hamlet and “unquiet thoughts.” Readers, too, share a sense of unquiet at the end of Hannah’s book; here, there is no cheap comfort, no easy answer, nothing worth having that is not hard-won. Despite—or perhaps even because of—this unquiet, the book is worth your time. Rich in complexity, masterful in its poetics, stark in its candor, Inflorescence proves a poignant monument to an accomplished poet.