Topic: Brecken Hancock

Say you’re a poet. Maybe you mean

Hi, I have a lot of feelings.

Stripped down to only its domestic battle scenes, life is bloodier, more depraved and more terrifying than it is in real time. The violence and trauma of rape, child abuse, battery and addiction relentlessly advance through Roxanna Bennett’s The Uncertainty Principle without pause or breath or respite. The first half of the book is particularly harrowing as poems about sexual exploitation (“I’m everything you’ve wished for. You’re everything I suffer”) are followed by poems about vicious patriarchs (one “bounced the baby until his neck felt soft”), which are followed by poems about mental illness and hospitalization (“This one (symptom) naked in snow, / points the pistol of his fingers to his temple / blows out the hidden sickness”).