Tony Hoagland
Tony Hoagland was the recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize and the James Laughlin Award. His poetry collections include Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God, Recent Changes in the Vernacular, and What Narcissism Means to Me, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He died in 2018.
— From March 2019Message To A Former Friend
I just wanted to write and say, / in case you are hit tomorrow by a truck / or are swept from the beach by a freak wave
August 2015Selected Poems
— from “Song for Picking Up” | Every time that something falls / someone is consigned to pick it up.
May 2014Spanish Ballad
That barista, Mother, / with the dark-roast eyes / and the silver nail / through her left eyebrow, / who pulls the handle / of the espresso machine / with such imperial ennui / — Mom, does she not know / that she is killing me?
December 2013Selected Poems
— from “Special Problems in Vocabulary” | There is no single particular noun / for the way a friendship, / stretched over time, grows thin, / then one day snaps with a popping sound.
November 2013St. Sebastian
First baseman / for the King James Bible Martyrs, / my favorite guy / in the whole New Testament, / all those arrows sticking out of him / like a pincushion.
June 2012Selected Poems
— from “The Best Moment of the Night” | You had a moment with the dog, / down near the base of the butcher-block table / just as the party was getting started.
April 2012Please Don’t
tell the flowers — they think / the sun loves them. / The grass is under the same / simple-minded impression / about the rain, the fog, the dew
September 2011Selected Poems
— from “Summer Dusk” | I put in my goddamn hearing aid / in order to listen to a bird that sounds / like the side of a drinking glass / struck lightly by a fork
December 2010Lost Keys
Holding a black wire coat hanger in his hand, / bending a loop in the tip with a pair of pliers, / my neighbor Mr. Alvarado is walking down his drive
June 2010Selected Poems
— from “Wasp” | Why should I have to deal with so-called human beings / when I can be up on the roof / hammering shingles harder than necessary
December 2009The Social Life Of Water
All water is a part of other water. / Cloud talks to lake; mist / speaks quietly to creek.
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