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"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.
List 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
About the author
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.
Summary
Re-imagining a tempered surrealism for the twenty-first century, Nathan Hoks’ Reveilles moves from the landscape of dreams into a beautiful reality. Fusing deadpan humor with subtle emotional registers, Hoks’ “laughing angel” reminds us: “The sky holds nothing to the ground.”
