Application for Release from the Dream
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The eagerly awaited, brilliant, and engaging new poems by Tony Hoagland, author of What Narcissism Means to Me
The parade for the slain police officer
goes past the bakery
and the smell of fresh bread
makes the mourners salivate against their will.
—from "Note to Reality"
Are we corrupt or innocent, fragmented or whole? Are responsibility and freedom irreconcilable? Do we value memory or succumb to our forgetfulness? Application for Release from the Dream, Tony Hoagland's fifth collection of poems, pursues these questions with the hobnailed abandon of one who needs to know how a citizen of twenty-first-century America can stay human. With whiplash nerve and tender curiosity, Hoagland both surveys the damage and finds the wonder that makes living worthwhile. Mirthful, fearless, and precise, these poems are full of judgment and mercy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his fifth poetry collection, Hoagland (Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty) lives up to his reputation for humor, though it's the incisive, self-lacerating, and sad variety. Unfolding like disturbing conversations, Hoagland's lines react to middle age, to a persistent sadness, and to an apparently recent divorce, in a way that ends up mocking that sadness as he wonders "whether a third choice exists/ between resignation and/ going around the bend." He's also sad about the U.S., imagining with wistful pleasure its future decline: "it's nice to sit on the shore of the Potomac,/ and watch Time take back half of everything." Most notably, he's sad, self-conscious, thoughtful, and mad at himself about race. Hoagland has become one of the few white poets of his generation to address race as an unavoidable subject. In 2011, he was publicly criticized for a poem seen by many as racist, and the incident remains implicitly in the background as Hoagland examines his privilege: "When I find my books in the White Literature section of the bookstore... dismay is what I feel / I thought I was writing about more than that." At the very least, Hoagland understands what he does not know, and this volume may bring him a more positive kind of attention.
