Su Flatt and Zach Hannah embrace the magic of the everyday with ‘I Love You, Punk’

Compiling the works that make up I Love You, Punk (Fading Neon Press) doubled as something of a romantic excavation for Su Flatt and Zach Hannah, the two poets combing back through verses written to and about one another in the years since they met and started dating in 2014.

In separate early March interviews, Flatt and Hannah both recalled the sense of uncertainty that in many ways defined those earliest months and years, and which surfaces in a handful of the poems scattered throughout the pair’s new collection. Flatt’s “Stormy Love Cento” depicts a severe thunderstorm as intense as it is brief, while Hannah’s “Oh Hush, We Love” hinges on a line that lands like a punch to the gut: “We won’t last forever.”

Over time, however, these more ephemeral images eventually began to give way to ones with more permanence, temporary weather systems replaced by deep rooted, tightly grasping vines.

“It started off a more seasonal-type thing, because we were both pretty realistic that we weren’t a likely couple,” said Hannah, who will join Flatt for a book release celebration at Two Dollar Radio Headquarters on Tuesday, March 4. “And you mentioned the word ‘root,’ and that’s what it did. It became rooted over the years. And in that [the poems] went from the air and the wind to much more seeking permanence and seeking more ground and purchasing more ground for ourselves.”

Aspects of this uncertainty can be traced at least in part to early insecurities held by each poet, with Hannah and Flatt each describing themselves in more fragile terms while praising the other for their comparative steadfastness. “It was almost embarrassing,” Flatt said of their experience compiling poems for the book, “because it was like, ‘Wow, this is really 10 years of someone really, really struggling to accept being worthy of being loved,’ and then another person sort of safely letting them figure it out.”

Hannah, in turn, labeled his earlier self “a wreck,” both in terms of his physical condition (a lifetime of manual labor has exacted a toll on the poet’s body) and his living situation, which for years remained perpetually up in the air. “And because I value stability more than most people,” Hannah said, “I just didn’t feel like I had anything to offer anyone, structurally or otherwise.”

Prior to meeting Hannah, Flatt had never written a love poem, considering them to be too flimsy, too saccharine. But while the book contains countless moments of sweetness, the poems included within generally feel more hard-won, reflective of the reality that love is something that requires sacrifice, dedication, and genuine emotional labor. The two also share a tendency to avoid portraying the emotion in more sanctified terms, instead leaning on the tenderness of everyday scenes: tenderly holding hands, watching bad movies, the wiggling of dirty socks.

“I don’t want to say the poems are not grandiose, but the language is not grandiose,” Flatt said. “I think one thing we’ve both noticed as we’ve gotten older … is how much love exists in the small things and the small moments and the ordinary. … These small things, these tender moments, that is the connective tissue. That’s what holds it all together. And [Zach] shows me the miracle in the ordinary all of the time.”

Flatt said the couple first hatched plans for the book last year at “6-1-Fort,” during which the two invited attendees to assemble whimsical “poetry forts” at Franklinton Farms. Within their contribution, Flatt and Hannah constructed a “tunnel to the future” in which people could escape to consider their hopes and dreams for the months and years to come. For the two, these aspirations included collecting the love poems they had long written for one another, an idea that in that moment reached the ear of friend and fellow poet A.D. Detrick of Fading Neon Press, whose offer to publish the work helped bring it to life.

Flatt said the couple assembled the bulk of the collection in a single night, taking turns reading their works aloud to one another in what they described as “a six-hour conversation using our poems.” The experience proved revelatory, with the two uncovering the lovingly symbiotic nature of their relationship in their verses. Hannah frequently compares Flatt with various flora, for example, while Flatt has a tendency to frame Hannah as a steady source of light.

Ping-ponging between poems by the two, I Love You, Punk captures the feel of being partner to this conversation, taking in the pair’s playfulness, their willingness to share their vulnerabilities, and the hard-won and ever-deepening affection they have for one another. Indeed, the collection suggests that part of love’s magic is the way it can be strengthened by being pushed to a breaking point, whether through miscommunication, missteps, or a failure to see for a time our own worth in ways that can make us reflexively pull away. “Like tumbling is a way to learn what upright means,” Hannah writes in “The Fidelity of Cycles.”

In putting together the book, the two also learned to view these earlier, more unsteady versions of themselves with a degree of grace, Flatt sharing the evolution that took place as they revisited and revised their poem “I Know Some Things Now,” the initial draft of which began at more than a dozen pages. “And in it, I was grappling with this idea, like, do I even deserve to be in a relationship? Do I deserve to be cared for in the way I’m being cared for?” said Flatt, who recalled the original ending as more ambiguous. “It was like, ‘I don’t know, but I’m going to try.’”

In revision, as in life, this tentativeness eventually gave way to something more resolute, the poets emerging together on steady ground. “I know we asked if We could be best friends maybe, and we said sure,” Flatt writes in closing. “And all of this is love. I know it is. I’m sure.”