Hannah Rousselot is a queer, French/American poet, author, and educator who writes about mental illness, love, loss, and queer themes. She is also the host of the podcast Poetry Aloud.
Hannah has over 40 publications and has been nominated for Best of the Net 2019. She is the author of Fragments of You and Ocean Currents. You can purchase them here.
Praise for Ocean Currents
Ocean Currents is a collection of poems that are immediately relatable, and tinged with waves of profound sadness. Rousselot deftly explores the depth of depression and the small cruelties of the world with lonely imagery and gorgeous metaphor. Each poem melds seamlessly into the next, telling a story of a girl who often feels hopelessness, fear, and anger, but who still sees profound beauty, and is still here.
–Mela Blust – author of skeleton parade and they found a woman’s body
In Rousselot’s Ocean Currents, the world unpeels around us as the speaker witnesses their own psyche. Not only does Rousselot take on the language of possibility in her work, but she also tackles mental illness incisively, showing how vulnerability can be both a triumph and an act of violence. Throughout her collection, Rousselot illuminates how even our innermost senses of trust can be breached: “even now, / I can’t trust my own perception of my hurt.”
–Samantha Fain, author of Coughing Up Planets
Praise for Fragments of You
Hannah Rousselot’s Fragments of You is a book you will read more than once. Like the love it describes, it is so satisfying that you won’t be happy without it nearby. In steamy poems like “Pool,” Rousselot re-creates the body of the beloved in ink. Her words will lodge in a permanent nook of your brain. They will well up as you contemplate your love in the bed beside you, aglow in lamplight, or swimming in the sea. This is not a sonnet sequence, like the “Astrophil and Stella” to which one poem refers, but there’s nothing loose or uncrafted in the lines – they are svelte and delicious, softly chiseled, and sometimes rough, sometimes at a voltage so intense, you have to draw your breath. And the images! The plums, the beacon, the eyes fizzier than champagne, the sand in the bottom of her pocket – they all reverberate. Of course there is also loss in this volume. Love is want, after all, a product of the fear of losing. “Adrift,” “Lost,” these simple titles belie the intensity of the lover’s eventual grief, which the poems themselves convey. So here you have it — craft and matter. Settle in for a good read.
–Judy Swann, author of I am Stickman and Fool
Hannah Rousselot 