Nathan Hoks

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Biographical note:  Nathan Hoks has published poems and translations in Lit, Verse, Crazyhorse, Circumference, and many other journals. He is the author of the chapbook Birds Mistaken as Wind (Rhyming Orange Press), and the translator of Arctic Poems, a collection of Vicente Huidobro’s poetry forthcoming from Toad Press. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717927
ISBN:  9781844717927
Author:  Nathan Hoks
Title:  Reveilles
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Nov-10
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  5 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Re-imagining a tempered surrealism for the twenty-first century, Nathan Hoks’ Reveilles moves from the landscape of dreams into a beautiful reality. These restless, death-tinged poems keep asking, “Why do I suddenly feel so sentient?” Fusing deadpan humor with subtle emotional registers, Hoks’ “laughing angel” reminds us: “The sky holds nothing to the ground.”

Main description:  Reveilles, Nathan Hoks’ first collection of poems, re-imagines a tempered surrealism for the twenty-first century. Hoks combines dream-like sequences with flashes of reality—in fact, rather than escaping the world for the rich pleasures of dreams, Hoks’ poems often move from the landscape of dreams into a beautiful reality. Lovely and love-struck, these fiercely witty and wildly imaginative poems—including meditations on icicles and a “listless oboist” with “no note for green”—manage to transform into love poems before our eyes. Formally various and rhetorically questioning, Hoks’ restless, death-tinged poems keep asking, “Why do I suddenly feel so sentient?” Hoks’ speakers “like to walk / behind these prop-like thoughts” only to recognize they will soon become “the up-and-coming moss.” Fusing deadpan humor with subtle emotional registers, the “laughing angel” in this book reminds us: “The sky holds nothing to the ground.”

Table of contents:
Contents
Points
Inside the Body
Primer
Bread without Crust
Navigator
Islands
Transmissions
Greeting the Severed Music
Fuck the Cookies
Buffer Zones
Light Air
Symptom A
The Cicatrix
Poem
To His Mistress Going to Bed
Postscript
Condensation
Three Days in Omaha
Echo Train
Radio Station
New Farmhand
Somnambulist
What Are You Taking to the Potluck?
Anonymous Master
House Party
The Helping Hand
Coda
Landscape
Another Posture
Book of Clouds
Foghorn
Am I a Deck of Cards?
Surface Cloud
Easy Listening
Aroma Therapy
Inside Out
Vanishing Point
Hanging the Whale
The Sam Plan
Burrito
Mouth of Clouds
Wool
Footprints
Delete That
The Wrong Side of Waking
Day of Capes
Holding Patterns
Scrapbook

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Excerpt from book:  

Inside the Body

Saying things can be hard. I try
to keep quiet, but the apartment
does not clean itself. I fiasco with the
windstorm named after a young
woman I once knew in Chicago.
I hope her hair has grown back.
I hope her nose has stopped glowing.
I step onto the bus and walk
into a sudden recollection. I am
standing on my hands under-
water wondering why you are not
impressed. The new mangoes lie
in the fruit basket. Wow, that’s
nearly perfect, and when I hold
the basket between my lips it is
an emblem of love. If I reach out
with my left hand it is to sell fish
wholesale. The right hand belches
and obeys nothing. These frantic
messengers with long hair and golden
belt buckles arrive calling for the
marriage of opposites. They are covered
in sweat and swearing at me. Why should
I show them my I.D? It’s true, I delay
the obvious. All things made flesh
fall to pieces. For this we learn to speak.

Unpublished endorsement:  “The sense of the body flowing from an old comfortable posture / to a new exciting yet strange position” is the animating force in Nathan Hoks’ dazzling first collection of poems. His fine gradations of observation (“exciting yet strange”) turn the reader into a barometer of strong subtleties like those of the weather, that can be minute even as they affect us powerfully. These poems are like great gulps of fresh air.

John Ashbery

Unpublished endorsement:  With courtly delicacy and humility belied by subtly extreme declarations and refreshingly diverse means, Nathan Hoks’ poems can be one moment deceptively plain-spoken, the next broadcasting from a typhoon. Reveilles may wake us “into some small nebula,” but it would make of our minds and hearts comets and red giants.

Dean Young