Review by Booklist Review
As his new collection's title attests, Hoagland is very clever. And funny, of course; one poem bears the instant-belly-laugh title, Cause of Death: Fox News. The best part of his cleverness is that it's applied to genuinely serious matters, as other titles, like An Old Friend Takes off Her Blouse to Show Me Her Reconstructed Breasts, unambiguously signal. Surely one of the best ways to consider such matters is with humor, often sarcastic: Oh Life! that poem ends, How do you expect for us / to be in love with this? Hoagland accomplishes the grieved-and-chuckling, variably ferocious tone of most of these poems, so often about sickness and death, by getting down a lot of the personal context of addressing the distressing, such as a Bob Seger earworm or the annoyingly abundant wisdom on the average bookshelf. Whether expansive or brief as aphorism see Ten Reasons Why We Cannot Seem to Make Progress, in which each reason registers vividly in one, two, only once in so many as five lines the affect Hoagland conveys is often breathtaking.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this sixth collection, Hoagland (Application for Release from the Dream) writes of America as though writing to an old friend, with an irritability that is both charming and deeply satisfying: "We have// everything we need,/ don't know what the/ hell it is, don't want it, won't/ remind each other, refuse/ to listen." He toggles effortlessly between lyric passages of striking natural and emotional beauty and the grouchy humor of such lines as "I will tell you this right now: Cincinnati has not been a great success for me." Throughout, Hoagland's work is refreshingly accessible without compromising sophistication or a complexity of thought. In his opening poem, he unflinchingly relates his particular flaws: "My ferocious love, and how it repeatedly is trapped/ inside my fear of being sentimental;// my need to control even the kindness of the world,/ rejecting gifts for which I am not prepared." Hoagland is both a wry participant in and keen observer of America in "the twilight of the white male dinosaur," a land that is filled with a profusion of beauty that gets burned through "like it was/ wrapping paper." Between headlines, unavoidable mortality, and the crush of consumerism, Hoagland focuses his work in the brief "moments when the mind unclouds/ and old injuries are forgiven." (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Multi-award-winning poet and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Hoagland (What Narcissism Means to Me) brings both humor and grief to a stirring poetic discourse. The poems reveal a remarkable mix of simple diction and documentary detail linked together with dark humor and sarcasm: "I have a girlfriend who freely expressed her opinion/ that people born in Bangladesh had probably incarnated there/ to work out their issue with poverty." The poet ruminates on themes from love to alienation while also navigating the cultural estrangement we experience in modern life. Poetry here is a form of sorrowful awakening to one's finality and an acknowledgement of life's powerful flow: "who would have imagined?/ Me in the hospital, with Leonard Cohen/ and still too ignorant to die." Hoagland creates domestic settings in most of his poems and uses them wittily to stage his quest for insight and deeper meaning. The minor details of daily life are significant and used as an embodiment of life rather than mere notations of it. VERDICT Hoagland imbues smooth narrative with irony and surreal humor to deliver an especially rewarding book. Recommended for all poetry -readers.-Sadiq Alkoriji, Broward Cty. Lib. Syst., FL © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
