Bridget Hanson is Achieving the Things She Wants to Achieve

Bridget Hanson’s Posies, Pins, and Other Pragmatics is a poetic flowering of the author’s inner and outer worlds. Varying from sunny love poems to bloody beaches of betrayal, Hanson’s work is singular in one thing only: a heartbeat that says “I can.”

Before any dreams of publication, Hanson’s poetic journey began in a middle school classroom. “I was just writing what I needed to get out,” she recalls. “I started comparing and contrasting different poetry and taking what I liked out of each.” Inspired by poets like Pablo Neruda, Hanson quietly posted her writing as a means of self-expression.

Posies’ journey as a book was similarly humble. “I decided to publish it, but really all I wanted [was] a physical collection of my work, and maybe for some family to get copies,” says Hanson. The more Hanson considered publication, though, the more appeal the idea held. Posies became a reckoning of her existence. “It was a culmination of things—I was struggling with where I was in life and comparing myself to other people. I realized I gotta try to do one thing that I’m proud of. It might take a lot of work and be scary, but I just had to see where it goes,” Hanson explains.

For Hanson, who has ADHD and anxiety, the book became as much a symbol of willpower as it was artistic expression. “My ADHD and anxieties kept me from doing a lot of things I’ve wanted to do. It got to the point [where] I just kept thinking, ‘I love writing poetry and it makes me happy.’ I wanna try to do something with that.” Hanson examined the work she had crafted since first writing as a tween. Encouraged by family and friends, she began updating her portfolio. “Most of the poems in that book were things that I had already written before deciding to create a book,” says Hanson.

As the project took shape, Hanson unpacked different periods of her life. In “Pins,” the second portion of her book, she explores the hurt in her spiritual past. “I grew up Christian, and two or three years ago, I decided to leave the religion I was born into.” Leaving her church was a paradoxical, difficult experience. “I want to kill myself, and yet / I don’t want to be dead. / ‘Cause all I really wanna kill / Is the noise inside my head,” writes Hanson in “Between the End and a New Beginning.” “I would notice people who were members of [my religion] and they would act in ways that were not very loving. That always kind of bothered me,” she remembers. As Hanson probed her faith, poetry became even more important as self-expression. 

“I take my share / Of what I sow…Yea I release / Who holds me low,” begins “Indomitability Incantation.” Ultimately, it was faith in family, friends and herself that brought Hanson through her crisis. “I wish I could say that the book tells a clear story [of my life] but the poems are all mixed together,” says Hanson. “I was thinking a lot about the real people who have inspired some of those poems. I [now] believe in altruism and being kind and making things easier for everyone.”

Hanson dedicates the book to those who supported her, ranging from the unnamed figures in her poems to her brother Zachariah Hanson, who provided illustrations. “I threw this book out there into the world and it was really liberating. I put it out because I wanted to and if anyone can latch on to one poem out of the whole thing, it’s accomplished something for me,” she says.

Pick up Posies, Pins, and Other Pragmatics at King’s English Bookshop, Planted in Pages, the Provo and Sugar House Barnes & Noble locations and on Amazon. Follow @bridgets_literary_garden on Instagram for further releases from Bridget Hanson.

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Through Suffering, Hope: The Healing Power of Betsy L. Ross’ The Bones of the World