Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God
Poems
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
“Hoagland’s verse is consistently, and crucially, bloodied by a sense of menace and by straight talk.” —The New York Times
My heroes are the ones who don’t say much.
They don’t hug people they just met.
They don’t play louder when confused.
They use plain language even when they listen.
Wisdom doesn’t come to every Californian.
Chances are I too
will die with difficulty in the dark.
If you want to see a lost civilizaton,
why not look in the mirror?
If you want to talk about love, why not begin
with those marigolds you forgot to water?
—from “Real Estate”
Tony Hoagland’s poems interrogate human nature and contemporary culture with an intimate and wild urgency, located somewhere between outrage, stand-up comedy, and grief. His new poems are no less observant of the human and the worldly, no less skeptical, and no less amusing, but they have drifted toward the greater depths of open emotion. Over six collections, Hoagland’s poetry has gotten bigger, more tender, and more encompassing. The poems in Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God turn his clear-eyed vision toward the hidden spaces—and spaciousness—in the human predicament.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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."
