SOFTLY UNDERCOVER

Winner of The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize
Published February 14, 2024 by Mad Creek Books

From its opening insistence on “not love but procedure,” Hanae Jonas’s Softly Undercover explores the possibilities and limitations of ritual and repetition, asking what it means to believe and see clearly. Formally rangy poems map out territories of devotion and divination, contrasting the realm of mystery, dreams, and symbols with the alienation of the mundane. Against a backdrop of intimate relationships, small towns, rural landscapes, and claustrophobic interiors, Jonas casts her gaze on isolation, nostalgia, repression, visibility, and loss while examining the desire “to go anywhere more docile / than facts.” Animated by uncertainty, this elliptical and lyrical debut dwells in the pleasures and hazards of illusion.

Available from The Ohio State University Press and Bookshop

Praise for Softly Undercover:

“In Softly Undercover, lyric’s devotional mode is both thrall and throe: the powerlessness and pain of being in relation to a higher power, of being ‘a constant / hostage to mystery.’ These masterful poems make stringent, witty music. ‘Three times removed / from any grip on home,’ Hanae Jonas writes, ‘which place is the real life?’ Instead of answers, the stark beauty of these lyrics offers just enough succor to sustain the ardent devotion of us, ‘the earthly alone.’”

—Brian Teare

“Language itself is the protagonist in these spell-woven poems, simultaneously soliciting and fending off the sharp outlines we mistake for understanding. ‘I’m coming down with morning,’ says their speaker, as though it were an illness. Hanae Jonas is after nothing less than the springs of consciousness here and firmly turns her back on paraphrasables. A bold and absorbing debut.”

—Linda Gregerson

“Softly Undercover is a stunning collection that carefully shapes isolation, sorrow, fracture, and uncertainty into original imagery and sonic nuance, inducing a breathlessness with its candid, valiant pauses and admissions. It casts society’s procedures and the haunted flourishes of the soul in remarkable light.”

—Marcus Jackson, Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize judge