Erin Hoover, No Spare People

It is tempting to want always to reduce the thing to its detail. To make it small.

That morning I wore heels, and because I had to walk forty blocks that way, I no longer wear them, I said for the first time a year after 9/11 at an event commemorating the cataclysm. I don’t remember the walk home at all, but I would say it again and again. (“Death parade”)

The latest from Tennessee-based poet Erin Hoover [see her ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here] is the full-length collection No Spare People (Black Lawrence Press, 2023), a follow-up to her full-length debut, Barnburner (Elixir Press, 2018). Hoover offers short, carved narratives in a sequence of compact lyric, articulating sharp images on and around domestic patters and patterns in the author’s American south, and the complexity of writing through experiences that often feel far away from the possibilities of writing. “I was trying to explain that transportation / between having thoughts and doing for others,” she writes, in the opening poem “On the metaphor, for women, of birthing to / creative activity,” “because in every household the metaphor is clear: / the caretaker is a woman, and so / when I began / writing, I listed out my mornings, the preparations / and cleaning up of spills and toys, taking down / and fetching, the driving and carrying of people / that no one wants to know about / if we believe in the reality of book contracts / and job offers.” She writes of income inequality, misogyny, motherhood and family, as the poems circle around the locus of home and family, and the conflict between a weight of domestic expectation set against the desire for something else, also, beyond (such as writing). “You’d have to understand the home / as a unified construct,” the poem “Homewrecker” begins, “as a guarded entity, / locked up like a bank vault, a virgin / or like a rarified set of collectable dolls / with no inherent value but worth agreed / upon.” The density of her lyrics are quite striking, moving through prose poems and more traditional lyric shapes, moving through frustration, love, motherhood, helplessness, politics and rage, offering cutting moments, phrases and lines I’m tempted to endlessly quote. That line from “Death parade,” for example—“It is tempting to want always to reduce the thing to its detail. To make it small.”—or further moments, thoughtfully carved. “I drove to the border // of my dry county and bought a handle of vodka,” she writes, as part of “My generation is not lost but we are losing,” “drank to blur my vision. I wanted to be as useless // as a governor.” She tells stories with lyric punches, where the mind can’t help but catch, consider.