Selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series by Dean Young John Ashbery called Reveilles, Nathan Hoks’s debut book, a “dazzling” collection and Hoks a poet whose “fine gradations of observation turn the reader into a barometer of strong subtleties like those of the weather, that can be minute even as they affect us powerfully.” The poems in Hoks’s new book, The Narrow Circle, perform a similar magic. In associative lyrics and fabulist prose, Hoks explores inner and outer experiences. The poems frequently focus on the body as a membrane where everything becomes inside-out—where the “face disperses with angels of teeth and loam,” where “sky comes out of the mouth,” where a giant green worm “burrows a hole in the head,” and where the heart is a vestibule that cannot be closed. Suites of pictures within the text further delineate this inward-outward pull, offering visualizations of interior voices and sketches of exterior shadows.
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.”
Selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series by Dean Young John Ashbery called Reveilles, Nathan Hoks’s debut book, a “dazzling” collection and Hoks a poet whose “fine gradations of observation turn the reader into a barometer of strong subtleties like those of the weather, that can be minute even as they affect us powerfully.” The poems in Hoks’s new book, The Narrow Circle, perform a similar magic. In associative lyrics and fabulist prose, Hoks explores inner and outer experiences. The poems frequently focus on the body as a membrane where everything becomes inside-out—where the “face disperses with angels of teeth and loam,” where “sky comes out of the mouth,” where a giant green worm “burrows a hole in the head,” and where the heart is a vestibule that cannot be closed. Suites of pictures within the text further delineate this inward-outward pull, offering visualizations of interior voices and sketches of exterior shadows.
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