H. L. Hix is that rare poet who is equal parts historian, journalist,
archivist, and singer.--Susan M. Schultz
Nobody now at work in American verse combines [H. L. Hix's] attraction
to programmatic Big Projects (narrative, philosophical, or procedure
driven) with his supple interest in older tones and forms.
-- Stephen Burt, The Believer
First in The Huffington Post list of "The 17 Most Important Poetry
Books of Fall 2010."
"[H.L Hix is] one of our most daring poets, his oeuvre a rebuke to
timidity, apathy, and retreat in any of its manifestations." --Anis
Shivani
From Orders of Magnitude:
Songs surround us, but we hardly hear them.
Jostling girls laugh in rapid Japanese.
The neighbor's sprinkler fortes for the part
of its arc that frets the climbing rose. Crows
bicker. One woman solicits her scales,
a cappella. Another sobs. Windchimes
domino the direction of each gust.
A broom rasps across warped, weathered porch boards.
I did it, Mama, a child says. Songs fall
on us as feathers fall on a river.
H. L. Hix's poetry collections have not been merely collections. Each
creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts: each poem contributes
to a sequence, each sequence talks to another. For readers already
acquainted with Hix's ambitions, the subtitle Obsessionals (instead of
Selected Poems) will need no explanation: from collections that don't
just collect, what sense would it make for a selection just to select?
Hix's poems were already at work rewriting and recontextualizing
language from various sources: fragments of Pythagoras, apocryphal
gospels, and speeches of George W. Bush. In First Fire, Then Birds,
Hix keeps at the task, recontextualizing his own poems, creating a
revision (seeing anew) and recomposition (putting together afresh) of a
distinctive body of work. Readers already aware of this essential
writer's work will find here its fullest development; others will be
welcomed into the
