Tony Hoagland's first book, Sweet Ruin, was awarded the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and the Zacharis Award from Ploughshares at Emerson College. A member of the writing faculty at the University of Pittsburg, Hoagland has also received grants from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation.
"A self-proclaimed postmodern confessionalist poet, Hoagland's
poems gather and distribute so much energy it's like he's a boxer
-- or a wrestler -- rather than a writer."--T Magazine, "My 10
Favorite Books: James Franco" "An absolutely refreshing compound of
playfulness and depth . . . There's no warmed-over theory on this
menu, and no guilt casserole, either: [Donkey Gospel is] an
unabashedly spicy book. But if one is seduced into the book by the
wildness of its flavors, one finishes by loving its
substance."--Heather McHugh "There's an underlying sweetness to the
poems, and a gratitude for having survived so much human
fecklessness (including, of course, one's own), and these
complicate the poems' anger and puzzlement and rumple their severe
surfaces. The resulting mixture has much of the complexity of a
personality that willingly weathers its own perplexities and
experiences, rather than striking a pose of competence and trying
to ride out the storm."--William Matthews "If the current flush of
identity politics has you bored beyond belief, you might look for a
deeper and truer sense of identity and belief in Donkey Gospel.
It's a powerful second book, and leaves one wanting more."--Harvard
Review
"In Donkey Gospel, Hoagland's puzzlement is palpable, and yet his
effervescent cleverness and original twists of phrase, sometimes
aphoristic in philosophical content, ring true. His poetry of
cultural irony, contemporary sexuality, and the absurdities of the
rock-and-roll generation leave us with a satisfied feeling of
having ridden out a storm." --Ruminator Review
"[A] series of autobiographical poems about being a guy, from
backslapping tales of sexual exploits to the dark and dirty truths
of male animalism . . . Apologetic for being cerebral, Hoagland
pays homage to Auden and D. H. Lawrence in poems that recognize
one's powerful vocabulary and the other's ability to fight, and
fuck, and crow in prose." --Kirkus Reviews
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