Table of Contents

Bible All Out of Order 3
Gorgon 5
Immersion 7
Disclosure Agreement 9
Botany 11
Why I Like the Hospital 13
Squad Car Light 15
Turn Up the Ocean 17
The Reason He Brought His Gun to School: A Blues 19
Butter 21
Diagnosis 23
Nature Is Strong 25
Illness and Literature 27
“On a Scale of 1–10,” Said the Nurse, “How Would You Rate Your Pain Today?” 28
Bandage 30
American Story 32
Ode to the West Wind 35
How the Old Poetry Happened 36
I Don’t Ask What You’re Thinking 38
Causes of Death 40
Virginia Woolf 42
Four Beginnings for an Apocalyptic Novel of Manners 44
The Power of Traffic 46
Weather of Pain 48
Autumn 50
On Why I Must Decline to Receive the Prayers You Say You Are Constantly Sending 51
Mistaken Identity Librarian Syndrome 53
Landscape without Jason 55
Walk 56
Success 57
Dante’s Bar and Grill 59
King of the Night 61
Siberia 62
Economica 64
The Decline of the Roman Empire 65
Cuisine 66
The Interfaith Chapel Is in the South Terminal 68
Homework 70
Reading While Sick in the Middle of the Night 71
Harbor 72
Incompletion 73
Sunday at the Mall 74
Among the Intellectuals 76
In the Beautiful Rain 77
Peaceful Transition 79

Afterword by Kathleen Lee 83

About the Author

Tony Hoagland (1953-2018) was born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. His father was an Army doctor, and Hoagland grew up on various military bases throughout the South. He taught at the University of Houston and in the low residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. He lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and was married to the writer Kathleen Lee. His first collection, Sweet Ruin (1992), won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. His second, Donkey Gospel (1998), won the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets. The third, What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), was shortlisted for a National Book Circle Critics Award. His first UK book of poems, What Narcissism Means to Me: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2005) drew upon these three collections, and was followed by Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (2010) and Application for Release from the Dream, published by Graywolf Press in the US in 2015 and by Bloodaxe in Britain in 2016. The final two collections he published in his lifetime, written over the same period, were a small collection, Recent Changes in the Vernacular (Tres Chicas Press, 2017), and Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God (Graywolf Press, 2018). The Bloodaxe UK edition of Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God (2019) also includes some poems from Recent Changes in the Vernacular. His posthumously published final collection Turn Up the Ocean (Bloodaxe Books, UK; Graywolf Press, USA, 2022) was assembled by Kathleen Lee from the poems he was writing in the year before his death from cancer. He also published Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft (Graywolf Press, USA, 2006) and Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays (Graywolf Press, USA, 2014).

Reviews

He belongs to that wagon-circle of American poets who believe in a "common reader"…Hoagland is a poet of a ragged, half-satirical, half-lyrical intensity. If Billy Collins is Updike, Hoagland is Salinger, or perhaps Holden Caulfield…making us think we know the ground we are on, then showing us that we don’t… For me, he not only pulls the rug from under my feet when it comes to the moral complacencies and platitudes that I don’t notice I live by, he does the same with my given poetic certainties.
*Poetry London*

Hilarious, searing poems that break your heart so fast you hardly notice you’re standing knee deep in a pool of implications. They are of this moment, right now – the present that we’re already homesick for.
*Marie Howe*

The writing is classic Hoagland: accessible and conversational, sometimes humorous, as he scrutinises everything from a book he's reading to mortality and the emotions that arise when he thinks of the music of Leonard Cohen while sitting in a hospital waiting room... The work raises important questions 'about the hazards of playing at innocence', why our culture can't seem to make progress and why no one seems to recognise the impending environmental crisis.
*The Washington Post*