"Softly Undercover is a stunning poetry collection full of lyricism that is authentic and inventive. The poems in this book carefully shape isolation, sorrow, fracture, and uncertainty into original imagery and sonic nuance. This collection induces a breathlessness with its candid, valiant pauses and admissions, and it casts society’s procedures and the haunted flourishes of the soul in remarkable angles of light." —Marcus Jackson, Associate Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Ohio State University, author of Neighborhood Register
“In Softly Undercover, lyric’s devotional mode is both thrall and throe: the powerlessness and pain of being in relation to a higher power, of being ‘a constant / hostage to mystery.’ These masterful poems make stringent, witty music. ‘Three times removed / from any grip on home,’ Hanae Jonas writes, ‘which place is the real life?’ Instead of answers, the stark beauty of these lyrics offers just enough succor to sustain the ardent devotion of us, ‘the earthly alone.’” —Brian Teare
“Language itself is the protagonist in these spell-woven poems, simultaneously soliciting and fending off the sharp outlines we mistake for understanding. ‘I’m coming down with morning,’ says their speaker, as though it were an illness. Hanae Jonas is after nothing less than the springs of consciousness here and firmly turns her back on paraphrasables. A bold and absorbing debut.” —Linda Gregerson