The Narrow Circle

<b>Selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series by Dean Young</b><p></p><p>John Ashbery called <i>Reveilles</i> Nathan Hoks's debut book a dazzling collection and Hoks a poet whose fine gradations of observation turn the reader into a barometer of strong subtleties like those of the weather that can be minute even as they affect us powerfully. The poems in Hoks's new book <i>The Narrow Circle</i> perform a similar magic. In associative lyrics and fabulist prose Hoks explores inner and outer experiences. The poems frequently focus on the body as a membrane where everything becomes inside-out--where the face disperses with angels of teeth and loam where sky comes out of the mouth where a giant green worm burrows a hole in the head and where the heart is a vestibule that cannot be closed. Suites of pictures within the text further delineate this inward-outward pull offering visualizations of interior voices and sketches of exterior shadows.</p>