163 Days with Hannah Hodgson

Join Hannah Hodgson at this online event as she talks with Rhian Edwards in a discussion of trauma, truth and care in her brilliant debut collection, 163 Days.

Hannah Hodgson is a poet, writer, palliative care patient and advisory consultant. Her poems have been published by BBC Arts, The Poetry Society and Magma, amongst others. She is a recipient of a 2020 Northern Writers Award and the 2021 Poetry Business New Poets Prize. Her first pamphlet Dear Body was published by Wayleave Press; her second Where I’d Watch Plastic Trees Not Grow was published by Verve. She is a recipient of both the Diana and Diana Legacy Awards. From January to July 2022 she will be contributing editor for Poetry Wales.

163 Days is the compelling debut collection from award-winning poet Hannah Hodgson. Using a panoply of medical, legal, and personal vocabularies, she explores what illness, death and dying does to a young person, as both patient and witness. 163 Days is the length of Hannah’s longest period of hospitalisation to date. In this long poem, she probes her truth, the law’s truth, and the traumatic truth, something only the body can hold. These truths clash as loudly as a dropped tray of instruments in a silent operating theatre.

The speaker is a teenager on the cusp of adulthood. The ward is decked out in primary colours. Volunteer clowns visit sick children. Each patient gets four Easter Eggs. Only one child is able to eat, while the others can only stare on. Hannah begins to forget the taste of food. Doctors struggle to diagnose her overlapping chronic health conditions. She suffers painful symptoms, and numerous procedures to keep her alive long enough to figure out what is wrong.

The online link will be available before the event.