Grace

John Hodgen's Grace presents an operatic cast that includes Abraham Lincoln, the poet's family, Harpo Marx, Boris Karloff, Boxcar Willie, and Garbo—to name a few—and a wide range of settings from Fenway Park in Boston, to Florence and Rome, to 'backwoods Tennessee' and the 'Coolawhatchie Blimpie Gas n' Go.' Through lively diction and skillful work with form, Hodgen turns zaniness to tenderness; loneliness to joy. This surprising, welcome book of poems is full of thanksgiving, charm, and much good grace.

John Hodgen's beautiful book is a reminder that the elegiac exists not to invoke sadness, but to open and, finally, celebrate our shared experience of the great depth of feeling loss reveals in us. Few poets have rung this bell with the silver and loving precision to be found in Grace. Poem after poem is so charged with affectionate clarity that the whole book breaks, like a wave, toward a kind of atonement.

Hard and dark as the world of these poems often is, Hodgen manages again and again to somehow transform the crucified world into a dazzling vortex of language and syntax and yet authentic shivelights of grace. Here is a unique and unmistakable voice for our moment.

Hodgen's poems countermand the dictates of mass culture that impress upon readers images of airbrushed and Photoshopped perfection. [His] assembled imager of the common aspects of life . . . reflect the sublime sense of grace one can attain by paying close attention to the most familiar things.

Hodgen has penned a masterful work that has left me deeply moved. High recommended.

Eclectic, introverted, and original. His voice, with all its commercialisms and idiosyncrasies, is distinct and sincere; his experience is authentic and compensatory. He accomplishes the most a poet can hope for.