Thrilled that my second book, Every Living One (forthcoming in early Jan), is available for pre-order at horse less press with the rest of their stellar 2015 catalogue: Nikki Wallschlaeger's Houses, Anne Cecelia Holmes's The Jitters, Sara Peck and Jared Joseph's Here You Are. I'm also incredibly grateful for advance praise that's come in from Donald Revell, Norma Cole, Paul Naylor, and G.C. Waldrep.
EVERY LIVING ONE
The flower
spike is ‘not square’ each blade contains 2-9 flowered spikelets
below spikelets
not stiff with slender keel and ribs
Outside, grass is thicker light
wet
fresh looking.
How to express differences light’s
persistence
mutable by foliage. (“DEERFIELD”)
Composed through the
accumulation and solve of discrete interwoven series, EVERY LIVING ONE attends to presence rent by attachment and
loss—creation entrusted to itself, further bewildered by text(s) and belief. It
picks through the razor briar of “born-again” religious rhetoric and junks the
abstraction of transcendentalism to embrace visionary experience, cleaving to
practice grounded in relinquishment and acts of salvage that accompany the
transformative threshold of edges
Beads of condensation
Streak green grill hem
Meaning these traces
Won’t come into focus (“SEWN”)
__________________
"To
show and to affirm the image of the world is a rash act anymore, as nowadays we
read and write for colorless grammarians. Nathan Hauke, thank heaven, is a rash
man, a poet who loves the precipice he finds in every image and in his mind's
eye. He is the glad captive of a good world and of its graces. Every Living
One tells the bright, bright story of that captivity."
—Donald Revell
“This book of
poetry is an active remembering. ‘But who / can say the order of things,’ asks
the poet, along with Michel Foucault. See the clear and precarious moments of
sun and snow, the world of industry and nature, the poignancy of human nature.
‘Addicted to language,’ Hauke’s cutting edge tracks thought’s shining
immediacy.”
—Norma Cole
“In Every Living One, Nathan Hauke, like Ronald Johnson, works the
compost heap left by the New England Transcendentalists—Emerson, Hawthorne, and
Thoreau all leave traces throughout this careful, delicate, yet tough-minded
book. Hauke’s world is—as it should be—a more broken, more littered world than
his predecessors, a world composed of as much consumer debris as natural
beauty. And it’s to our benefit that Hauke has the tenacity and integrity not
to turn his back on either, allowing him to take us to the numinous edge of
perception: ‘There is must be a
higher origin of.’ Every Living One
explores the isn’t as much as the is of that possible higher origin, all while
facing directly the sorrows of death and poverty haunting everyday life; yet
beneath that layer of sorrow we find at the book’s core a ‘Raw knot of
gratitude.’ That gratitude comes through on each page of this compelling book.”
—Paul Naylor
“What if the
secret heart of rural America were a still waiting, an all-but-silent
psalm? These lyrics are delicate, involuted fossils of a trance-like
attention that somehow does not exclude chronic underemployment, neighbors up
on assault charges, and other vicissitudes of contemporary rural living.
In the tradition of C.D. Wright, besmilr brigham, and perhaps Lorine Niedecker
above all, these are poems ‘learning the mirror and field guide,’ becoming ‘a
process of mapping’—not just of place, but also of being-in-place, an
angled consciousness that pares itself away even as the lines all but dissolve
on the reader’s sympathetic eye-tongue.”
—G.C. Waldrep
—G.C. Waldrep
.jpg)
