Full of so much gratitude to come home to a box of books! Big love to Jen Tynes/ The Magnificent Field, Alban Fischer, and Nick Potter forever! Indian Summer Recycling has a link up at SPD: https://www.spdbooks.org/…/978…/indian-summer-recycling.aspx
Blurbs for Nathan Hauke’s Indian Summer
Recycling
To
undo the blind arrogance of our common-sense—arrogance that knows what beauty
is, arrogance that knows what love is worth and what is worthy of love—we need
a poetry that gets tangled in the tangled roots. Nathan Hauke’s Indian Summer Recycling is a book of
such poems. They offer us a singular devotion that occurs in countless forms, a
religion that asks “for the widest definition of presence” (“New River train”).
Such religion puts the eye before the
idea, and each idea has a visage, has a face, and looks back; such religion
puts the family dog before lifeless dogma. Poems so turned toward life remind
us that we still are learning how to live and must take the book’s dearest
advice: “Count yourself one among so
many blessings / A vessel to be filled and laid to waste” (“Gunshots up the
ridge”). No eternal ease, no heavenly comfort here—we are given just the gifts
that are the days, just the loving harm that is our harmony.
—Dan Beachy-Quick
Nathan
Hauke’s Indian Summer Recycling reminds us that the ethics of
recycling inscribe also a loss of origin. In the world of things—which
includes people, and the language in which we describe those things— hierarchy
vanishes. Animal, mineral, and ultimately refuse, things are themselves the
evidence of their use and reuse. Finally, everything is nature.
Though forever in the present tense, hope—or perhaps simply tenderness?—Hauke’s
attention lives in the pivot between the desire to “Love what’s gone/Ahead into
new noise and affection” and the “layered reverberations of childhood
hymns” (“Long gone lonesome”). In their sway between blue’s refrains and
the language of depiction, the poems in Indian
Summer Recycling are beautifully true in their anguish.
—Claudia
Keelan
If the word takes root, & the phrase finds traction to stay on
the page, as we read along we thank Nathan Hauke for giving us the trail that
is Indian Summer Recycling. A way into words that deepens our
joy, gratitude, & clarity for our impermanent life in this
world. Composting the ghostly reverberations of what is heard, &
seen. Composing, decomposing, partnering in the dance of presence
and absence. A poetry where even the cross-outs sing
(softly). This is a beautiful blues music—of Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan,
& John Milton—reclaiming the moment when spirit speaks, speaking through
the moment most clearly in its erasure, its disappearance. Places
peopled deeply. A sustaining domesticity, an undercurrent of
familial affection. Hauke’s is an ethical way of writing, with deep
roots in early American literature. The way to the heights is word
by word, step by step.
—Hank Lazer
