Andrew Faulkner
I’ve never read anything quite like Xanax Cowboy, with its lassoed dream logic or its pistol-drawn showdown with dread. But that’s life when you live in a Wild West of anxiety, and nowhere else can you find this prescription-laced, wasp-sting aesthetic. Hannah Green’s poems are a form-bending live wire, a chainsaw ethos that carves its way through the desert sunset. A long howl in cowboy boots that refuses to be wrangled, Xanax Cowboy is original and compelling.
Jury Citation
Xanax Cowboy is a meta-poetic romp that chews through the lexicons of pulp, pop, and academia, spitting out pieces that are at once campy, dark, and gnawingly tender, with a bravado and showmanship that challenge conventions of power, performance, gender, and genre. Through roving tours of tone and tactic … Hannah Green mounts a contemporary antihero with both a light and devastating touch, knowing just when to loosen the slack and when to jerk the line arrestingly taut.
From the Publisher
"Xanax Cowboy is a meta-poetic romp that chews through the lexicons of pulp, pop, and academia, spitting out pieces that are at once campy, dark, and gnawingly tender, with a bravado and showmanship that challenge conventions of power, performance, gender, and genre. Through roving tours of tone and tactic … Hannah Green mounts a contemporary antihero with both a light and devastating touch, knowing just when to loosen the slack and when to jerk the line arrestingly taut." — Jury Citation, 2021 Bronwen Wallace Award
Dallas Hunt
A fierce collection on cowboy boots and alienation, with incisive and insightful thoughts on navigating mental health, Hannah Green’s debut is all tooth and claw. It bristles, sears, and haunts. At once individual, and yet illuminating in the affective commons it articulates, Hannah has created a home here — come dwell.
