Eli Steiner Hamilton is a poet and musician whose work explores the ways consciousness breaks, reforms, and finds coherence over time. Born in San Francisco and raised in the Pacific Northwest, his writing is shaped by long attention to landscape, memory, and inner experience. Forests, rivers, canyon floors, and interior thresholds recur throughout his work— not as backdrops, but as living fields in which perception shifts and meaning gathers.

His book-length manuscript, A Cosmology of Self, grew over many years as a response to personal fracture and the need for a form large enough to hold transformation without reducing it to confession. Structured as a cycle of five directions—Emergence, Wounding, Descent, Rising, and Return—the manuscript approaches change as a recursive movement rather than a linear narrative. The poems trace identity as provisional and reassembled, shaped by lineage, loss, vision, and the quiet work of attention.

Hamilton’s background in music strongly informs his poetic practice. Rhythm, silence, repetition, and tonal variation shape both individual poems and the larger arc of the manuscript. Rather than arguing for insight, the work relies on pacing and resonance, allowing understanding to arise through sequence and return. Influences range from the grounded clarity of William Stafford and Mary Oliver to the mythic reach of Rilke and the psychological immediacy of contemporary narrative poetry.

At its core, Hamilton’s work is concerned with responsibility: how one carries what has been gathered through experience without turning it into authority or spectacle. A Cosmology of Self does not offer doctrine or resolution, but a record of consciousness reassembling itself—one that invites readers to recognize their own patterns of descent and return, and to stand within them with greater coherence and care.