Application for Release from the Dream

by Tony Hoagland

Overview

Are we corrupt or innocent, fragmented or whole? Are responsibility and freedom irreconcilable? Do we value memory or succumb to our forgetfulness? Application for Release from the Dream, Tony Hoagland’s fifth collection, pursues these questions with the fierce abandon of one who needs to know how a citizen of 21st-century America can stay human.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780372983
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	10/22/2015
Edition description:	International
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	9.21(w) x 6.22(h) x 0.43(d)

About the Author

Tony Hoagland is the author of four previous poetry collections, including Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty and What Narcissism Means to Me, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of two collections of essays, Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays and Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft. He has received the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, the Mark Twain Award from the Poetry Foundation, and the O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He teaches at the University of Houston and in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Table of Contents

A Little Consideration

The Edge of the Frame 5

Summer 6

Ode to the Republic 8

Proportion 10

Application for Release from the Dream 11

Wine Dark Sea 12

The Hero's Journey 13

Special Problems in Vocabulary 15

Eventually the Topic 17

Little Champion 18

Dreamheart

Crazy Motherfucker Weather 21

Dreamheart 23

The Roman Empire 24

But the Men 25

Don't Tell Anyone 27

Bible Study 29

Misunderstandings 30

Introduction to Matter 31

The Social Life of Water 32

The Wetness 33

Romans 35

Misunderstandings

The Neglected Art of Description 39

Airport 41

A History of High Heels 42

A Little Consideration 43

Please Don't 44

Faulkner 46

Wasp 48

The Complex Sentence 49

Controlled Substances 50

WhiteWriter 52

Ship 53

Because It Is Houston, 54

Crossing Water 56

Update 58

The Edge of the Frame

Reasons to Be Happy 61

December, with Antlers 62

His Majesty 63

Western 65

Song for Picking Up 67

The Story of the Mexican Housekeeper 68

Coming and Going 71

Real Estate 72

Fetch 74

Summer Dusk 76

There Is No Word 77

Aubade 79

Note to Reality 80

Editorial Reviews

Few [poets] deliver more pure pleasure. His erudite comic poems are backloaded with heartache and longing, and they function, emotionally, like improvised explosive devices.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times on Tony Hoagland

“Tony Hoagland is a provocateur, a brash interventionist, a deeply engaged Whitmanian poet and critic who poses, like the master, as ‘one of the roughs.'” —Edward Hirsch on Tony Hoagland

From the Publisher