Erin Hoover is the author of Barnburner, winner of the Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award and a 2018 Florida Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, and in journals such as Prairie Schooner, Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Pleiades. Hoover has served as past editor of the Southeast Review, volunteer for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and co-founder of the literary organization Late Night Library. Originally from Pennsylvania, she now lives in Tallahassee.
Books
Blurbs, Press, & Reviews
“Erin Hoover’s supple, lucid voice, her storytelling skill, and the sheer linguistic and emotional intelligence of her poems make it hard to believe that Barnburner is a first book. There are poems here about bad jobs, environmental threat, about having or not having children, about sex, violence and many kinds of coercion, and maybe most of all about helplessness and control: who has control, how do we go out of control, how do we find our way back if we do. A political, personal and timely book.”
—Daisy Fried
“Tough, sly, and profane in confronting the absurd in conventional white feminine sexual identity, Erin Hoover’s poems chronicle the coming-of-age of a wounded yet increasingly liberated psyche of an ingénue who has survived the wants, disappointments, and outrages of having become a serious and considerable woman. Narrative and irony are her major modes as she navigates through origins in nondescript yet sexualized experience and what she eloquently calls the hierarchies of the flesh, cumulatively reaching, poem-by-poem, a Walpurgisnacht of reckoning that takes down the lashes and lies of false female consciousness. Erin Hoover s poems burn like freebase on the delicate tissues of female innocence.”
—Garrett Hongo
“Erin Hoover’s debut poetry collection, Barnburner, announces a poet of serious gifts and immense range. With landscapes moving from the hollowed-out towns and broken wilderness of central Pennsylvania to the grinding financial bustle of New York City, Barnburner explores nothing less than what it means to be human in a virtual age, capturing both the deep loneliness and intense connectivities of our present moment. In an era of poetry that sometimes feels built for disposability and diminished attention spans, Hoover is a poet of earnest intellectual weight and historical awareness.”
—Erin Belieu
“Hoover exhumes the skeletons buried neatly behind the white picket fences of modern America in a debut that is rife with outspoken disillusionment. … [This] candid portrait of normalized cruelty is likely to get readers to question their own malignant perceptions and passivity in the face of injustice.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Hoover’s debut poetry collection is a fitting attempt to kick down staid, prim, even academic poetic doors.”
— Booklist
Love what we do? Take a second to support us on Patreon!