Americas Tony Hoagland (1953-2018) was known for provocative poems which interrogate human nature and contemporary culture with an intimate and wild urgency, located somewhere between outrage, stand-up comedy, and grief. The poems in his final collection Turn Up the Ocean examine with an unflinching eye and mordant humour the reality of living and dying in a time and culture that conspire to erase our inner lives. Hoaglands signature wit and unparalleled observations take in long-standing injustices, the atrocities of American empire and consumerism, and our continuing habit of looking away. In these poems, perseverance depends on a gymnastics of scepticism and comedy, a dogged quest for authentic connection, and the consolations of the natural world. Turn Up the Ocean is a remarkable and moving collection, a fitting testament to Hoaglands devotion to the capaciousness and art of poetry. Tony Hoagland's poems poke and provoke at the same time as they entertain and delight. He was American poetry's hilarious 'high priest of irony', a wisecracker and a risk-taker whose disarming humour, self-scathing and tenderness are all fuelled by an aggressive moral intelligence. He pushed the poem not just to its limits but over the edge.
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Product Details
Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
Publication Date: 23 Jun 2022
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publication City/Country: United Kingdom
Language: English
ISBN13: 9781780376318
About Tony Hoagland
Tony Hoagland (1953-2018) was born in Fort Bragg North Carolina. His father was an Army doctor and Hoagland grew up on various military bases throughout the South. He taught at the University of Houston and in the low residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. He lived in Santa Fe New Mexico and was married to the writer Kathleen Lee. His first collection Sweet Ruin (1992) won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. His second Donkey Gospel (1998) won the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets. The third What Narcissism Means to Me (2003) was shortlisted for a National Book Circle Critics Award. His first UK book of poems What Narcissism Means to Me: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books 2005) drew upon these three collections and was followed by Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (2010) and Application for Release from the Dream published by Graywolf Press in the US in 2015 and by Bloodaxe in Britain in 2016. The final two collections he published in his lifetime written over the same period were a small collection Recent Changes in the Vernacular (Tres Chicas Press 2017) and Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God (Graywolf Press 2018). The Bloodaxe UK edition of Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God (2019) also includes some poems from Recent Changes in the Vernacular. His posthumously published final collection Turn Up the Ocean (Bloodaxe Books UK; Graywolf Press USA 2022) was assembled by Kathleen Lee from the poems he was writing in the year before his death from cancer. He also published Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft (Graywolf Press USA 2006) and Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays (Graywolf Press USA 2014). He was given a number of literary honours including the Jackson Poetry Prize awarded by Poets & Writers magazine; the Mark Twain Award given by the Poetry Foundation; and the O.B. Hardison Jr. Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library.