Update from James Hoch

Semi-semi-semi-semi professional soccer player in the over 50 division for the Cornwall Eternos and Professor of Creative Writing, James Hoch has two books forthcoming. Radio Static from Green Linden Press and Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey. The former engages the difficulty of brothers trying to communicate across the expanse of a political and experiential divide. It interrogates language’ as the necessary but insufficient  vehicle for connection and intimacy. The latter completes a trilogy of the decadence and bliss, grace and tumult that is the life of a white boy from Jersey. Masculinity (such as it is) parenthood, the flux that is self thread through the collection like a yellow road through black pine. Of Radio Static, Elizabeth Scnalon, Editor of The American Poetry Review, writes: “I love the only way I can,” writes James Hoch, and that love is woven throughout this excellent treatise on compassion and masculinity. Hoch knows a great deal about the complexities and solace of brotherhood, and in these poems we experience an endangered tenderness—the recognition that another can be both yourself and not yourself at the same time. This willingness to grapple with differences and come away with a connection merits your attention. Pick up the walkie-talkie and you will hear “each calling the other: / You there? You there?” Of Last Pawn Shop, poet Matt Donovan comments:  This is an astonishing, beautiful, and utterly unforgettable book, packed with honed and deeply moving poems that drop “lead sinkers in the gray bay of self” as a means of interrogating, among so many other things, grief, privilege, fatherhood, the solace and failures of art, the many ways in which we wound each other, and the inexhaustible desires “we lug our flooded selves toward.” The twins arrive around the holidays.

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