Application for Release from the Dream: Poems

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. [em](Sept.) [/em]