Books by Tony Hoagland

America's Tony Hoagland is known for his provocative poetry which interrogates human nature and contemporary culture with an intimate and wild urgency, combining outrage, stand-up comedy and grief. His late poems are no less sceptical and no less amusing, but they drifted towards the greater depths of open emotion.

Are we corrupt or innocent, fragmented or whole? Are responsibility and freedom irreconcilable? Do we value memory or succumb to our forgetfulness? Application for Release from the Dream, Tony Hoagland's fifth collection, pursues these questions with the fierce abandon of one who needs to know how a citizen of 21st-century America can stay human.

Tony Hoagland's zany poems poke and provoke at the same time as they entertain and delight. He is American poetry's hilarious 'high priest of irony', a wisecracker and a risktaker whose disarming humour, self-scathing and tenderness are all fuelled by an aggressive moral intelligence. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Tony Hoagland's zany poems poke and provoke at the same time as they entertain and delight. He is American poetry's hilarious 'high priest of irony', a wisecracker and a risktaker whose disarming humour, self-scathing and tenderness are all fuelled by an aggressive moral intelligence. He pushes the poem not just to its limits but over the edge.