Flux (New Issues Poetry & Prose) - Contemporary Poetry Book Collection for Literature Lovers & Students - Perfect for Reading, Study & Gift Giving

Omens and half-kenned messages trail through this volume like so many ghostly ravens fading in and out of pines. Hogue's poems have turned off the personal epiphany, sign-in-nature, and narrative-of-emotion tracks and wandered into a clearing they are among the first to claim, where between sparsity (repeated tropes and words, clean, short forms and lines) and complexity (the fusion of thoughts that these poems are traces of) they hang suspended just outside of determinate meaning. Rather than as a collection (read: miscellany, arbitrary library), this book is best read as an echo chamber wherein elements from each poem reverberate into others, forming unexpected cross-currents which wash certain images (lake, lichen, fog, crows) over and over with intense attention, lifting them almost to a fairy-tale level of significance.As the title poem makes clear(ish), flux is both the element that purifies and prepares two bodies for merger and the process of merging, the hazy transfer of selves. Such mergings - of loss w/memory, dream w/life, love w/anger, lover w/lover - are Hogue's polestar themes in this book. Death here seems always at hand but never out of place, never "other"ed till it may be feared or escaped ("What Is Given You", "The Sense of Being Watched by More than We Can See"). It is an ineradicable part of the message we might never understand, though we're aware it permeates our living ("The Message"). Many poems carry as their germ folktale, myth, or retroapprehension of dramas in the distant past ("Tracks of Sand and Water", "The Changeling", "Finding the Way Back"), other flowings from these worlds into Hogue's.Although not many lines sing their being up off the page, Hogue's obliqueness and precision ensures that every word contributes to the often haunted atmosphere of these pieces. Most seem parables of hard passages in life ("Like Exile"), or journeys never undertaken ("The Waterfall"). Such parables lack the pithy zing of a moral, point, or standard instruction, but in evading this characteristic, Hogue opens the way for her poems to speak to each other, pass along secretive signals that we make out only in silhouette. In this way, ultimately, more of our lives, and the unfathomable superfluity of nature, is evoked. Each page of this book can be taken as a trailhead with three or four slender bodies curving out of sight into dusk and mist. Where they lead, and where they end, Hogue doesn't seem to say. She has only led us here, after carefully smudging the trail map so that its inks run in spectral figures.