"About the Work" with Hannah V Warren

In our "About the Work" series, Natalie Tombasco asks recent contributors for insight into their writing or for current sources of inspiration. Read Hannah V. Warren's poem, “Let Us Have Our Own Suffering," in SER Vol. 39.2.

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At its core, “Let Us Have Our Own Suffering” germinates from my obsession with how women experience/suffer/embrace Southern Gothic landscapes—both cultural & natural. Right now, I’m writing poems from the collective we, a grotesque & monstrous feminine voice that contracts & retracts & thinks deeply about how we define self & communal identities. What does it mean to write the monstrous, the vocalized undesirable? What does it mean for us to speak in tandem? I grew up in south Mississippi, & it wasn’t until I moved back south to Georgia that I started writing about & within the landscape that shaped me as a writer & a person. “Let Us Have Our Own Suffering” is the beginning of this preoccupation with tracing my interests in the Gothic, the strange, the uncanny to my deeply rooted cultural experiences—the white churches, the red dirt, the slander. In 2022, Carrion Bloom Books will publish my newest chapbook, Southern Gothic Corpse Machine, which centers this monstrous voice in a short collection of poems (including “Let Us Have Our Own Suffering”).

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HANNAH V WARREN is a doctoral student at the University of Georgia where she studies poetry and speculative narratives. She is the author of two chapbooks: [re]construction of the necromancer from Sundress Publications (2020) and Southern Gothic Corpse Machine from Carrion Bloom Books (forthcoming 2022). Her works have appeared in Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Passages North, and Fairy Tale Review, among others.