Xanax Cowboy: Poems

by Hannah Green

Overview

Winner, 2023 Governor General's Literary Award
Winner, 2024 League of Canadian Poets' Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

The Xanax Cowboy has a reputation like a rattlesnake. She might as well be a strike-anywhere match in a gasoline town. Her whiskey is mixed with vengeance like her mind is mixed with pills. The last doctor who told her she ain't nothin' is still spitting blood through a split lip.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781487011161
Publisher:	House of Anansi Press Inc
Publication date:	04/04/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

HANNAH GREEN is a writer and poetry editor at CV2. She was a poetry finalist for the 2021 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She lives in Winnipeg.

What People are Saying About This

Andrew Faulkner

I’ve never read anything quite like Xanax Cowboy, with its lassoed dream logic or its pistol-drawn showdown with dread. But that’s life when you live in a Wild West of anxiety, and nowhere else can you find this prescription-laced, wasp-sting aesthetic. Hannah Green’s poems are a form-bending live wire, a chainsaw ethos that carves its way through the desert sunset. A long howl in cowboy boots that refuses to be wrangled, Xanax Cowboy is original and compelling.

Jury Citation

Xanax Cowboy is a meta-poetic romp that chews through the lexicons of pulp, pop, and academia, spitting out pieces that are at once campy, dark, and gnawingly tender, with a bravado and showmanship that challenge conventions of power, performance, gender, and genre. Through roving tours of tone and tactic … Hannah Green mounts a contemporary antihero with both a light and devastating touch, knowing just when to loosen the slack and when to jerk the line arrestingly taut.

From the Publisher

"Xanax Cowboy is a meta-poetic romp that chews through the lexicons of pulp, pop, and academia, spitting out pieces that are at once campy, dark, and gnawingly tender, with a bravado and showmanship that challenge conventions of power, performance, gender, and genre. Through roving tours of tone and tactic … Hannah Green mounts a contemporary antihero with both a light and devastating touch, knowing just when to loosen the slack and when to jerk the line arrestingly taut." — Jury Citation, 2021 Bronwen Wallace Award

Dallas Hunt

A fierce collection on cowboy boots and alienation, with incisive and insightful thoughts on navigating mental health, Hannah Green’s debut is all tooth and claw. It bristles, sears, and haunts. At once individual, and yet illuminating in the affective commons it articulates, Hannah has created a home here — come dwell.

Editorial Reviews

"Green’s debut is timely and witty. It leaves nothing off stage, hides nothing. It is a revelation of living in our anxious times. It is wisely engaging." — Quill & Quire, STARRED REVIEW

"Hannah Green’s figurative language is so dazzling, her tone so sardonically witty … her debut is indeed a romp." — Toronto Star

"Even as it treats serious topics like romanticizing addiction, Xanax Cowboy is riotously funny, brimming with wit and bravado … Exceptional debut." — ARC Poetry

From the Publisher

A bingeable book of poetry … Xanax Cowboy displays a raw honesty on important topics. Green balances tone and content, form and media, to deliver a powerhouse of a debut book from title to finishing line.

Freefall

A true original – smart and aggressive and assured.

Shakespearean Rag

Playing on the way suffering has been romanticized in writers and in cowboys, Green skewers this cultural demand for authenticity.

Winnipeg Free Press

Breaching borders and breaking boundaries … [Xanax Cowboy] subverts expectations with feminist contortions in the twists and turns of phrase, form, and verse.

The Miramichi Reader

Even as it treats serious topics like romanticizing addiction, Xanax Cowboy is riotously funny, brimming with wit and bravado … Exceptional debut.

ARC Poetry

Green’s debut is timely and witty. It leaves nothing off stage, hides nothing. It is a revelation of living in our anxious times. It is wisely engaging.

STARRED REVIEW Quill & Quire

Hannah Green’s figurative language is so dazzling, her tone so sardonically witty … her debut is indeed a romp.

Toronto Star

[Xanax Cowboy is] often vain and ridiculous, direct and pulling no punches, with tangents of new shapes and fresh metaphors.

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