Application for Release from the Dream

by Tony Hoagland

Overview

The eagerly awaited, brilliant, and engaging new poems by Tony Hoagland, author of What Narcissism Means to Me

The parade for the slain police officer

goes past the bakery

and the smell of fresh bread

makes the mourners salivate against their will.

—from "Note to Reality"

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 of poems, pursues these questions with the hobnailed abandon of one who needs to know how a citizen of twenty-first-century America can stay human. With whiplash nerve and tender curiosity, Hoagland both surveys the damage and finds the wonder that makes living worthwhile. Mirthful, fearless, and precise, these poems are full of judgment and mercy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555977184
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	09/01/2015
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	728,948
Product dimensions:	6.04(w) x 8.89(h) x 0.29(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

07/20/2015
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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

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