The Listening. III -- Dedication -- Afghanistan -- Disgrace and Oblivion in Ancient Rome -- Recess -- Gainer -- Pine Barrens -- Self-Portrait as Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey -- Poem at the End of a Pier -- II -- This Drink Tastes Like History -- Landscape Resembling My Mother Dying -- Elegy with a Landscape of Iceland by Georg Guðni -- Elegy with Icarus and the Heart of a Hummingbird -- Palouse -- Puberty with Self-Portrait as Tiffky Doofky -- Halo -- Sunflowers -- III -- Global Studies -- Lithium Bath -- Advice to a Son as Garden Statuary -- Polycardial -- The Ask -- Leaving Well Enough Alone -- Parking Garage -- Primitivo Negativo -- Small Orange -- The Listening.
Summary:
"James Hoch's new poetry collection, Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey, contemplates how it is possible to live in a time of peril and to love someone who inflicts great damage. Navigating emotional experiences that followed his brother's going to war in Afghanistan, Hoch confronts questions about masculinity he encountered while raising his two sons and dealing with the death of his mother from ovarian cancer. Compounding and complicating narratives of history and conquest, apocalypse and erasure, identity and empire, Hoch's poetry investigates the difficulty of loving and of making beauty in times of crisis when faced with knowledge and experience of its limitations and necessity. These themes generate from the interstices of public and personal history, often evoking landscapes with views of the New York water supply system, industrialization along the Hudson River, and the geology of the Palouse, an area of the Pacific Northwest. By turns lyrical and meditative, Hoch's poems accumulate into a bare-knuckled argument for the sublime in the context of war and environmental degradation. Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey asserts the redemptive power of art as survival"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.