Hello I Must Be Going: Poems

by David Hernandez

Overview

Finalist, 2023 NBCC Award for Poetry
Finalist, 2022 California Book Award for Poetry

Hello I Must Be Going, David Hernandez’s fifth collection of poems, offers a unique take on poetry informed by works of art, in particular the work of artist Ed Ruscha. With narrative and lyrical brushstrokes, Hernandez crafts vibrant landscapes that depict the chaos of the modern world and the beauty entwined within it. Hello I Must Be Going pulses with originality. This is a book of our time, and of time itself—of unrest, loss, grief, and “this endless parade / shimmering toward silence.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822966807
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	03/22/2022
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Pages:	64
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

David Hernandez is the author ofDear, Sincerely; Hoodwinked, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry; Always Danger, winner of the Crab Orchard Series Award; and A House Waiting for Music. He has been awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes. His poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and The Best American Poetry. He is also the author of two YA novels, No More Us for You and Suckerpunch, both published by HarperCollins. David teaches creative writing at California State University, Long Beach and is married to writer Lisa Glatt.

Table of Contents

I Shoutout to Ed Ruscha

Hello I Must Be Going 5

We're This and We're That, Aren't We? 6

Depths of Despair 8

Hurry Up Schedule 12

It's Only Vanishing Cream 14

Woman on Fire 16

S.S. Nevertheless 18

Decibel House 20

History Kids 21

These Are Brave Days 22

Thinking the Same 23

Falling but Frozen 25

Historical Dust 28

A Life that Doubles-Back on Itself 29

Water Soluble Dreams 30

Those of Us Who Have Double Parked 32

Varieties of Internal Torment 33

Hello I Must Be Going 35

Uncertain Frontier 36

Century Sickness 38

Made in California 39

II The Silent Decent

Landscape with Pink Tulips Distorted by Dread 45

Landscape with Active Shooter Cutting through a National Park 46

Landscape with Frisbee and Dam Breaking 47

Landscape with American Sycamore and the Severed Heads of Bees 49

Landscape with Blurred Figures Running toward the Vanishing Point 51

Landscape with Pumpjacks Overtaken by Vines 52

Landscape with Protesters on One Side, Police on the Other, a Pasture in Between 54

Landscape with Abandoned Picnic and Flames 56

Landscape with Doctor Taking a Breather 57

Landscape with Cheetah Going Seventy in the Serengeti 58

Still Life (2020) 59

III Beside Our Breaths

Jean-Michel Basquiat's Bones 63

Ai Weiwei's Middle Finger 65

Marina Abramovic's Gaze 67

Meditation on Impermanence 71

Notes 81

Acknowledgments 83

Editorial Reviews

05/23/2022

The intriguing fifth collection from Hernandez (Dear, Sincerely) uses visual art as a foil for the unique possibilities of language. The poems in the first section take their titles from paintings by Ed Ruscha, whose work often placed words over color fields. The poems build scenes without describing the paintings directly, as in “S.S. Nevertheless”: “He is almost// a brook when he wanders around the yard, practically a river.” In the second section, each title begins “Landscape with...” but seems to reference no preexisting work by Ruscha or otherwise. Hernandez mobilizes visual art’s vocabulary: the sun sears “a bright white hole// through the canvas,” but there is “No museum guard or docent to tell/ what it all means”; “You look closely,/ closer still—until/ a museum guard clears his throat.” In the third section, other artists are invoked, bringing maker, art, and viewer together: “Praise the dead for bestowing us these, our waves./ Downstream, we’ll do the same.” Readers will appreciate the specific, thoughtful attention these poems generate about depression, government violence, and parental aging, as well as the inventive investigations of visual art motifs. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Readers will appreciate the specific, thoughtful attention these poems generate about depression, government violence, and parental aging, as well as the inventive investigations of visual art motifs.” —Publishers Weekly

“Hernandez demonstrates how some art helps us bear the world while also making us face its full menace and brutality. For Hernandez’s poem-gallery is frightening—full of death, sick loved ones, and dire social problems such as climate change, active shooters, and Trump’s abuse of migrant children. The book asks us to pay anguished attention to these threats and disasters, but offers art, and the ways we attend to art, as an intermediary between us and brute reality.” —Harvard Review Online
 

“I’ve read David Hernandez for twenty years, but only with this terrific new book am I realizing he is one of our generation’s leading California poets. Whether philosophical, playful, or political, his language is guided by generosity and wonder. He explores the shifting landscapes and shifting cultural grounds underfoot. Beneath his laid-back West Coast charm, he lays bare the intensities of modern life. Hello I Must Be Going is a book of irreducible wisdom and witness.” —Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

“Between the hello and the going lies the shadow—and the poem. In this compelling new collection, David Hernandez writes poems that tumble forward so intensely they rattle our teeth, and others that are nearly frozen in anticipatory grief. This collection offers up the choices we contend with in an era of ‘obliterating despair.’ Fret or sleepwalk, or take the world in through the senses, taste the fruit, ‘despite.’” —Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

From the Publisher