Application for Release from the Dream: Poems

Tony Hoagland is one of those poets you want to accompany in his F150 pickup on a road trip across Texas, from his teaching gig at the University of Houston to his home in Santa Fe, N.Mex., with a 12-pack of Tecate between you, and his funny, colloquial poems providing the mixtape. Application for Release from the Dream is full of poems like a rush of fresh air. We laugh alongside his narrators grappling with old age, like in "Summer," where "A forty-year-old man stares at a wetsuit on the rack:/ Is it too late in life to dress up like a seal and surf?"

While Hoagland does more than merely dip his toe in the darkness, he never lets it swallow him whole. He looks for and finds slivers of salvation. When his wife of six years reveals in "Don't Tell Anyone" that "she screams underwater when she swims," the narrator shrugs and suggests, "For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming silently/ as they go through life."

After rambling along from one amusing, troubling experience to another, Hoagland suggests one sure path to succor from the perils of life and diminishment of aging. In "There Is No Word," he finds redemption in language:

"how, over the years, it has given me
back all the hours and days, all the
plodding love and faith, all the
misunderstandings and secrets and mistakes
I have willing poured into it."

So put your boots up on the dash, pop a cold one and enjoy Hoagland's well-crafted evocative thoughts and humor. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.