Books by Paul Hoover

Paul Hoover now establishes himself as an important voice of deep emotional resonance and far ranging vision.

Paul Hoover's The Book of Unnamed Things is a lush exercise in antiphonal parallelisms, a call-and-response of flesh, speech, and world. The accumulation of debts and releases is mapped elegantly onto the reversible cloth of the spoken and unspoken, the written versus the unwritten (and in between, the handwritten, that prodigal alibi). The dialogue here is not so much with ghosts as with the idea of ghosts, the shadows cast in the mind by sensual and philosophical inquiry. "Words unspoken / remain forever old," Hoover asserts. The quiet power of this collection inheres in the accrual of experience, ever-exfoliating and opening continuously into a plain of juxtaposed signification: "the doors are wide open / all is context now."-G.C. Waldrep

Features poems that discuss the ethics of interpersonal relations, the social identity's conflicted relationship to self discovery, and the family bounds that function as a frame that both supports and limits potential.

Paul Hoover's wide-ranging subjects include the position of poetry in the electronic age, the notion of doubleness in the work of Harryette Mullen and others, the lyricism of the New York School poets, and the role of reality in American poetry.