EVERY LIVING ONE is available for pre-order at horse less press

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