Illinois Authors

The Illinois Center for the Book banner

Nathan Hoks

Born: in Colorado
Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: I was raised in the northwest suburbs, attended Loyola University Chicago, and have recently returned to live in Chicago.

Biography: Nathan Hoks is the author of two books of poetry, The Narrow Circle, forthcoming from Penguin, and Reveilles, which won Salt Publishing’s Crashaw Prize in 2010. He has also published a chapbook, Birds Mistaken As Wind, and a translation of Vicente Huidobro’s Arctic Poems. His translations and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as the Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Lit, Circumference, and Verse. Hoks holds graduate degrees from the University of Iowa and the University of Wisconsin, and has received residency fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Millay Colony for the Arts. He is currently an editor and letterpress printer for Convulsive Editions, a micro-press that publishes chapbooks and broadsides. He teaches at Columbia College and lives in Chicago with his family.


Awards:
  • -- National Poetry Series, ''The Narrow Circle''
  • -- Crashaw Prize, ''Reveilles''

Primary Literary Genre(s): Poetry

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

Email: nshoks@gmail.com
Nathan Hoks on WorldCat : http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=nathan++hoks


Selected Titles

Reveilles /
ISBN: 1844717925 OCLC: 651076468

Salt, London : ©2010.

"Re-imagining a tempered surrealism for the twenty-first century, Nathan Hoks' Reveilles moves from the landscape of dreams into a beautiful reality. These restless, death-tinged poems keep asking, 'Why do I suddenly feel so sentient?' Fusing deadpan humor with subtle emotional registers, Hoks' 'laughing angel' reminds us: 'The sky holds nothing to the ground'"--Page 4 of cover.

The narrow circle
ISBN: 9781101613092 OCLC: 858944580

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.

The narrow circle /
ISBN: 0143123734 OCLC: 820123638

 

 

Accessibility