'The Novel' is a booklength poem which examines the privilege of the novelist from the poet's point of view, asking in both astonishment and disappointment: why is the novelist at once the most lordly and common of authors?

At once rhythmically charged and stilled by the silences, Paul Hoover's Poems in Spanish takes the English language into fraternity with the haunting lyricism of Spanish, and in this way pays tribute to the great poets writing in the Ibero Hispanic tradition of the 20th century-among them Pessoa, Lorca, Vallejo, Andrade, Neruda, Sabines. Poems in Spanish is a collection written in English, but it is an English that surprises with its sharply etched and yet resonant cadences. Hoover's achievement reminds us that we often must hear our own voice translated through other mediums before we can...

Fiercely elegiac, the title poem of Paul Hoover's desolation: souvenir began as a "filling in" of the blank spaces in A Tomb for Anatole, Paul Auster's translation of Mallarme's grief-stricken notes for a poem that he never completed on the death of his ten-year-old son. However, Hoover's writing soon turned to his own consideration of life, death, the breaking of family relations, and loss of love as experienced by all of us: "when death plays / with a child / it goes out nimble / comes back cold / life that traitor / aboard a razor boat." Written in three terse stanzas, each of the poem's...