Prior to teaching, James Hoch was dishwasher, cook, dockworker, social worker and shepherd. His poems have appeared in Slate, The Kenyon Review,The Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, Carolina Quarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review and many others. They have been nominated many times for the Pushcart Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Summer Literary Seminars. […]
I’m 33, Christ’s age; you remember Christ. I was lucky enough to be born in New Jersey, so believe I am entitled to a few things: I’d like a stone house floating on a lake, for the stones to shimmy and fall into water, to salvage them, so I could learn masonry. I always wanted […]
Perhaps its dream is effortless drifting, riding the easy labyrinths of current, un-hounding its prey, a stay from hunger. Or maybe it dreams the way it lived, pursuing a marlin to a prison of coral, the looping shadow-play, the widening unhinged jaws, the sudden flash, clasp. Either way, the body gliding silent through the tank, […]
One must admire the desperate way it flings itself through air amid winter’s slow paralysis, and clings to shriveled fruit, dropped Coke bottle, any sugary residue, any unctuous carcass, and slug-drunk grows stiff, its joints unswiveled, wings stale and oar-still, like a heart; yes, almost too easily like a heart the way, cudgeled, it lies […]
The awkward-gaited, the under-ripe jacked-up over-jerseyed teenage boys spill onto the court, a slab of desert beaten in the yard of this way-station at the edge of the Reservation. The air-guitar player, the air-baller, half-court rim-clanger, the pimple-plagued conjurer of nipples, the bible-thumping believer that lingerie carries the meadow-scent of angels, they’re talking trash, snatching […]
Tristan Egolf (1971-2005) What sustains you when you forget your days barefoot in Paris, wooing and begging, pawning novel or guitar, or nights squandered dishwashing in Lancaster, when you can’t press your life in glass like a rare species of fly, and can’t remember what it was like shoving fist and crowbar against a VW […]
James Hoch, author of A Parade of Hands (Silverfish Review Press, 2003) and the forthcoming Miscreants (WW Norton, June 2007), talks about the genesis of his poem The Court of Forgetting.
James Hoch, author of A Parade of Hands (Silverfish Review Press, 2003) and the forthcoming Miscreants (WW Norton, June 2007), talks about how he became interested in poetry.