Tony Hoagland's poems interrogate human nature and contemporary culture with an intimate and wild urgency, located somewhere between outrage, stand-up comedy, and grief. His new poems are no less observant of the human and the worldly, no less sceptical, and no less amusing, but they have drifted toward the greater depths of open emotion. Over six collections, Hoaglands poetry has become bigger, more tender, and more encompassing. The poems in Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God turn his clear-eyed vision toward the hidden spaces and spaciousness in the human predicament. Tony Hoagland's poems poke and provoke at the same time as they entertain and delight. He is 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 pushes the poem not just to its limits but over the edge. This UK edition of Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God also includes additional poems from another recent US collection of his poetry, Recent Changes in the Vernacular (2017).
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The writing is classic Hoagland: accessible and conversational, sometimes humorous, as he scrutinises everything from a book he's reading to mortality and the emotions that arise when he thinks of the music of Leonard Cohen while sitting in a hospital waiting room... The work raises important questions 'about the hazards of playing at innocence', why our culture can't seem to make progress and why no one seems to recognise the impending environmental crisis. * The Washington Post * He belongs to that wagon-circle of American poets who believe in a "common reader"Hoagland is a poet of a ragged, half-satirical, half-lyrical intensity. If Billy Collins is Updike, Hoagland is Salinger, or perhaps Holden Caulfieldmaking us think we know the ground we are on, then showing us that we dontFor me, he not only pulls the rug from under my feet when it comes to the moral complacencies and platitudes that I dont notice I live by, he does the same with my given poetic certainties. -- Henry Shukman * Poetry London * Hilarious, searing poems that break your heart so fast you hardly notice youre standing knee deep in a pool of implications. They are of this moment, right now the present that were already homesick for. -- Marie Howe
I
13 Entangle
15 A Walk around the Property
16 The Romance of the Tree
17 Happy and Free
18 Which Would You Prefer, a Story or an Explanation?
19 Nobility
20 No Thank You
22 Proof of Life
23 Distant Regard
25 Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God
II
29 In the Waiting Room with Leonard Cohen
31 Ten Questions for the New Age
33 Ten Reasons We Cannot Seem to Make Progress
34 Epistle of Momentary Generosity
35 A Short History of Modern Art
37 Theater Piece
39 Couture
40 An Ordinary Night in Athens, Ohio
41 Inexhaustible Resource
42 Achilles
43 Examples of Justice
44 Better Than Expected
III
47 The Truth
48 Frog Song
49 Scotch Tape
50 Playboy
52 Dinner Guest·
53 Rain-father
55 Moment in the Conversation
57 Marriage Song
58 Trying to Keep You Happy ·
59 Taking My Medicine
60 The Third Dimension
62 The Classics
IV
65 Upward
67 Good People
69 Cause of Death: Fox News
71 Real Estate
72 Legend ·
73 Data Rain
74 Confusion of Privilege
75 Hope
76 I Have Good News
78 Into the Mystery
V from RECENT CHANGES IN THE VERNACULAR
81 Questions of Influence
83 What They Told Me at the Boys Club in Gainesville
85 Noon at the Gym
86 The Age of Iron
88 Maybe a Hero Is Crossing the Mountains
90 Ken, Dont Go to Meet the Ex-Girlfriend
92 Butter
94 Empire
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, 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, due out in June 2019, also includes some poems from Recent Changes in the Vernacular. A final collection, Turn Up the Ocean, drawing on the last poems he wrote, is published by Bloodaxe and Graywolf in 2022. 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.
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