Application for Release from the Dream

July 20, 2015
In his fifth poetry collection, Hoagland (Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty) lives up to his reputation for humor, though it’s the incisive, self-lacerating, and sad variety. Unfolding like disturbing conversations, Hoagland’s lines react to middle age, to a persistent sadness, and to an apparently recent divorce, in a way that ends up mocking that sadness as he wonders “whether a third choice exists/ between resignation and/ going around the bend.” He’s also sad about the U.S., imagining with wistful pleasure its future decline: “it’s nice to sit on the shore of the Potomac,/ and watch Time take back half of everything.” Most notably, he’s sad, self-conscious, thoughtful, and mad at himself about race. Hoagland has become one of the few white poets of his generation to address race as an unavoidable subject. In 2011, he was publicly criticized for a poem seen by many as racist, and the incident remains implicitly in the background as Hoagland examines his privilege: “When I find my books in the White Literature section of the bookstore... dismay is what I feel—/ I thought I was writing about more than that.” At the very least, Hoagland understands what he does not know, and this volume may bring him a more positive kind of attention.

September 1, 2015
In his fifth, most eviscerating collection to date, Hoagland, one of America's most popular poets, uses his signature observations, cynically powerful and uplifting language, and wrenching honesty to thoroughly critique any endeavor which sidesteps the heart. Hoagland calls upon Whitman's everyman and Sandburg's painted woman of Chicago, among other iconic figures, to create a motley cast of characters who connect the mythic past and the urgent present. In The Hero's Journey, Hoagland downplays the romanticism of Gawain the Knight, asking him to remain haunted and frightful for a hundred nights . . . until he understands exactly how / the glory of the protagonist is always paid for / by a lot of minor characters. These characters include the woman in the nursing home, / who has worked there for a thousand years, / taking away the bedpans, / lifting up and wiping off the soft heroic buttocks of Odysseus. Hoagland is diligent, inquisitive, compelling, and barn-burning in these revelatory and necessary poems, which detail the landscape and take measure of the pulse of America within the greater human story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)