All posts tagged: Rebecca Hoogs

Notable Books (NW) – Reviews of Mary Szybist, Robert Wrigley, Nance Van Winckel, and more

Published by Keetje Kuipers

NOTABLE BOOKS (NW) – Fall-Winter 2014 The reviews included in this feature section were first published in our fall-winter 2014 print issue. Incarnadine, Mary Szybist (Graywolf Press, 2013) Readers have waited a long while for Mary Szybist’s second book, Incarnadine, and that seems right. In an age of gush and glut, Szybist works patiently; her poems exude painstaking care, every line fleshed out (or broken), every word placed (or erased), just so. I mean this quite literally: titles like “How (Not) to Speak of God” and “On Wanting to Tell [       ] about a Girl Eating Fish Eyes” demonstrate how in Szybist’s hands words both fill and empty out the spaces they occupy (in the breath, on the page). The effect is helped by the lovely, large-format book design, which amplifies the white space around each poem. And concrete instances, like the sentence diagram “It Is Pretty to Think” or the aforementioned star-shaped “How (Not) to Speak of God,” embody the lyrical impulse to make the felt world visible with persuasive tact. But this is …

Rebecca Hoogs: “Autobiography of Silence”

Published by Staff

This poem is one of the newest poems in my first full-length collection, Self-Storage, and was written in response to a series of photographs. The unifying theme for the photographs (all by different artists) was that they all included people being very, very quiet. I wrote a line for each photograph and compiled the poem that way. The first person voice came early on, though the title came only after revision and is cousin to other poems in the book that are self-portraits written as animals, architectural spaces, or concepts. I included this poem in the book because, even though it felt slightly different stylistically than some of its older colleagues, it fit with one of the themes of the book, which is silence. I’m interested in what we say and don’t say. What we say when we’re not saying what we’re thinking. What secrets we’re not spilling (careful: contents may be hot). What we’re trying to tie the stem of as if that’s somehow sexy. The sore we can’t leave alone. Of course, aren’t all …