The Narrow Circle

By Nathan Hoks

Selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series by Dean Young John Ashbery called Reveilles , Nathan Hoks's debut book, a "dazzling" collection and Hoks a poet whose "fine gradations of observation turn the reader into a barometer of strong subtleties like those of the weather, that can be minute even as they affect us powerfully." The poems in Hoks's new book, The Narrow Circle , perform a similar magic. In associative lyrics and fabulist prose, Hoks explores inner and outer experiences. The poems frequently focus on the body as a membrane where everything becomes inside-out--where the "face disperses with angels of teeth and loam," where "sky comes out of the mouth," where a giant green worm "burrows a hole in the head," and where the heart is a vestibule that cannot be closed. Suites of pictures within the text further delineate this inward-outward pull, offering visualizations of interior voices and sketches of exterior shadows.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0143123734
• ISBN13: 9780143123736
• Release Date: June 2013
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.9" x 8.7"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher