Hannah Han | Ars Non Poetica | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Hannah Han is a Taiwanese-Vietnamese writer from Los Angeles. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Passages North, Quarterly West, diode poetry journal, and COUNTERCLOCK, among others. She has received recognition from the National YoungArts Foundation, the Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Creative Writing Prizes, Bennington College, Columbia College Chicago, and The New York Times. She studies molecular biology and creative writing at Yale University and loves ink drawing and singing opera.

Also by Hannah Han: [insert stereotype] Nests Abecedarian in tiếng Việt

February 5, 2025

Hannah Han

Ars Non Poetica

— after Ada Limon’s “The End of Poetry” Enough of wisteria and sunsets, seafoam and petrichor, sweet rot and crushed petals. Enough of papayas bloated with seeds and the loquat tree beneath the sun and water flooding through the land, through the thinning trees and the mouthless city. Enough of amber light and soft, sticky light and cool fluorescent light, of the mother’s whisper and the family’s myths and the moon, whittled into a single shard of jade. Enough of ghosts — of haunting and roaming and suspension. Enough of calling to ghosts. Enough of blood blooming, rain-slicked skin, and incense blackening. Enough of stark bone and tender shoots, scallions and broth, glimmering knives and porcelain reflections: of wishing to swallow oneself into another body, or to be swallowed. Enough of loosening tongues and strained vocal cords. Enough of bodies split by labor, or grief. Enough of wordless girls and threadbare apologies, of thrashing hearts and pale love, of eyes and seams and suffocation, enough of am I invisible and do you know my name and I can’t hear myself here and if only, if only, if only — Enough. All I ask is that you hold me like this: unfiercely, and without abandon. Our bodies breaking as if we were once two halves of the same wishbone.

I attended a poetry reading by Ada Limon a year ago, which is when I first encountered “The End of Poetry.” Limon explained that she was frustrated with the themes that kept surfacing in her poems and began gathering a list of words and phrases that she found herself returning to. Eventually, she weaved them into “The End of Poetry”—a lush, insistent poem that speaks to the limitations of language in expressing the urgency of touch and human connection. “Ars Non Poetica” grapples with a similar disillusionment with over-poeticism and is layered with images that recur in my writing, yet its conclusion is more ambiguous.