Inventories by Paul Hogan

"Paul Hogan’s poems, Inventories, travel through woman, mother, into the natural world, dissolve in spirit and then coalesce again into man, father, the fact of death. They are careful accounts, fearless inventions, always crashing “the crystal of what I knew/ against the cold stone of what I didn’t.” Hogan’s poems do not seek to tell us how the world works; they want to “make it all inexplicable again.” His attention to what can and cannot be touched in life keeps Hogan and the reader on the edge of a clear, high gorge where the only viable response is to jump.

—Sherry Robbins, author of or, The Whale

These poems achieve their presence in the unique, transcendent moment of the poem itself. They reward and delight and ask us to rejoice in words and language as Ted Berrigan would say, “there is a person inside almost all of the poems.” The surface simplicity and plain speech are the result of true artfulness and sophistication. I continually rediscover honesty in his forceful, utterly clear and democratic voice. In that honesty, Hogan astonishingly opens us to the world and removes boundaries that keep separate different aspects of life. Giving us irrepressible, insightful ruminations, verbal collages and narratives that seem to be struggling to rise off the printed page as an elegy for the world in all its beauty and disturbing variety.

— Geoffrey Gatza, author of House of Forgetting

A forceful, unapologetic exploration of the masculinity of creative impulse. Hogan looks at nature, life, disparate moments, mysticism, and fatherhood not with rose-colored glasses but with the obsidian eyes of a realist unafraid to be caught submitting to his poetic instincts. Inventories is a work of great relevance, power, and importance.

—Gary Earl Ross, author of The Scavenger's Daughterd

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-101-6