Both letters and numbers are muses for poet Danielle Hanson in ‘The Night Is What It Eats’ 

A poem has more in common with a spreadsheet of numbers than you might think.

Both involve a sort of imaginative problem-solving and sleight-of-hand with images, says Danielle Hanson, who has been both a prolific poet and a professional mathematician. 

Hanson has just released her third collection, The Night Is What It Eats, a rich, hypnotic compilation of 79 jewel-like poems.

“This book explores several interlacing themes: saints complaining about their heaven; body parts disassembled and put to use in a surrealistic bending of reality; elegies to animals loved and unloved; magical realist poems and odes to nature and natural forces,” she says. “It is the world we live in but dismantled and reassembled. Parts of the whole are set free, like St. Lucia’s eyes — to see the world on their own.”

Hanson also published Fraying Edge of Sky, which won the Codhill Press Poetry Award, and Ambushing Water, a finalist for Georgia Author of the Year. She curated the poet/artist collaboration show Alloy at Arts Beacon in Atlanta, where she was poet-in-residence, and her verse was the basis for a puppet show called Haunting the Wrong House at the Center for Puppetry Arts. Her work has appeared in more than 100 journals.

Hanson, 54, was born in Atlanta and spent part of her childhood in Ellijay before her family relocated to Chattanooga. She first became interested in poetry as an undergrad at the University of Tennessee, where she found a mentor in Richard Jackson and earned bachelor’s degrees in both humanities and mathematics. Her honors thesis? This Page Left Intentionally Blank, a collection of her poems. Her hero? Pablo Neruda.

“I wanted to be a poet, but there was the matter of paying for groceries,” she says with a laugh.

She then attended Arizona State, where she again laser-focused on both sentences and equations. She holds an MFA in creative writing along with a master’s in mathematics with a focus on “chaos and nonlinear dynamical systems.”

Hanson’s work brought her back to Atlanta, where she crunched numbers for BellSouth and then AT&T, punching a clock in “the big tower downtown.” There was also the consuming, full-time gig mothering a set of twins.

“I think working in financial analysis freed up a lot of creative energy that I could then bring to the page,” she says. “There have been a couple of dual synergies in my life. With a poem, you start with an image that is absurd or real, or you take two things that don’t go together and make them work in combination. In my day job, I had to do a lot of PowerPoint presentations. They tell a story in an image-based medium in which every word matters. That is similar to writing a poem.”

Hanson now lives in Grant Park. “I’m an Atlantan through and through,” she says. But she is also bicoastal, commuting to the West Coast where she has been writer-in-residence at the University of California, Irvine, and serves as the inaugural poet laureate of Costa Mesa. She is about to embark on a new position at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she will teach poetry. “It’s a slightly shorter commute,” she says. 

For each poem, she fixates on, say, an object or a simple image, which she bats around like a cat with a ball of yarn. “I go through the day putting notes into my phone, and then I order them into an ode — little meditations, little odes. I do a lot of this imaginative work when I’m out walking in nature. It’s a very visual process for me.”

Hanson also finds gratification in collaboration. In her role in Costa Mesa, she led 150 other aspiring poets in composing a tribute to a park.

“I like aphorisms, proverbs and absurd puns. Sometimes awful puns!” she says.

Words, in her hands, are something of a numbers game. And vice versa.

Get the Book:

The Night Is What It Eats. Danielle Hanson. State University of New York Press, April 2026. $18.

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Candice Dyer’s work has appeared in magazines such as Atlanta, Garden & Gun, Men’s Journal and Country Living. She is the author of Street Singers, Soul Shakers, Rebels with a Cause: Music from Macon.