Description

Poems that inhabit a world of flammable metaphors and spiritual fog machines, delivering poems that are part elegy, part glitch, part lunar broadcast.

Moony Days of Being, Nathan Hoks' fourth collection of poetry, is a surreal and tender reckoning with absurdity, memory, and the unravelings of daily life. These odes, self-portraits, and dedicatory poems fuse humor with emotional urgency as they wrestle with parenthood, intimate loss, and ecological and political despair.

The book opens in a place of existential estrangement and gradually adopts an elegiac and relational tone, speaking to family, poets, and imagined interlocutors with uncertainty and longing. The title poem, a cento composed of lines from the book, weaves refrains from earlier pieces into a coda. Interspersed throughout the book are quatrains of found images captioned by lines from the poems, an intermedia form that presents a playful visual index of the book's motifs.

Hok's poems resist tidy epiphany. Instead, they zigzag and pulse with associative energy--a lyricism that questions its own coherence while inviting the reader into resonant, affective spaces. With homages to influences like Vallejo, Plath, and O'Hara, Moony Days of Being is as much a book of grief and exhaustion as it is a performance of loopy.