Enter your email Address

ENTROPY
  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Lost and Found

      April 14, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Elegy for a Tree

      April 12, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Coursing

      April 9, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: All These Birds

      April 8, 2021

      Introspection

      The Birds: Little Bird

      April 1, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band

      March 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Finding My Voice

      March 9, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Fragment One

      April 14, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: To Fly Among the Birds

      April 9, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Another Red Ribbon – a nonbinary tale of absented love

      April 5, 2021

      Fiction

      Survivor’s Club

      March 24, 2021

      Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Fiction by Matt Goldberg

      March 24, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Claiming Space in Muriel Leung’s “Imagine Us, The Swarm”

      April 15, 2021

      Review

      Review: Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz

      April 12, 2021

      Review

      Review: Some Animal by Ely Shipley

      April 8, 2021

      Review

      Review: Dark Braid by Dara Yen Elerath

      April 5, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS

      April 13, 2021

      Small Press

      Tolsun Books

      March 16, 2021

      Small Press

      Inside the Castle

      March 9, 2021

      Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch

ENTROPY

  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Lost and Found

      April 14, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Elegy for a Tree

      April 12, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Coursing

      April 9, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: All These Birds

      April 8, 2021

      Introspection

      The Birds: Little Bird

      April 1, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band

      March 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Finding My Voice

      March 9, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Fragment One

      April 14, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: To Fly Among the Birds

      April 9, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Another Red Ribbon – a nonbinary tale of absented love

      April 5, 2021

      Fiction

      Survivor’s Club

      March 24, 2021

      Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Fiction by Matt Goldberg

      March 24, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Claiming Space in Muriel Leung’s “Imagine Us, The Swarm”

      April 15, 2021

      Review

      Review: Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz

      April 12, 2021

      Review

      Review: Some Animal by Ely Shipley

      April 8, 2021

      Review

      Review: Dark Braid by Dara Yen Elerath

      April 5, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS

      April 13, 2021

      Small Press

      Tolsun Books

      March 16, 2021

      Small Press

      Inside the Castle

      March 9, 2021

      Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch
Review

The Poetics of Anger: Erin Hoover’s Barnburner

written by Keith McCleary November 19, 2018

Barnburner by Erin Hoover
Elixir Press, October 2018
88 pages / Elixir Press

 

If there is an underside to the age of next-level self-awareness and self-affirmation in which we currently find ourselves, it might be that we have lost the ability to be equally self-critical. As we learn to remind ourselves that we each have genuine individual value, and that the people and institutions who want us to feel otherwise must be put on notice, it seems more difficult to shine that harsh light inward—to acknowledge that we also might share some degree of cultural culpability. Increasingly, we think, we must be solely on either the right or wrong side of history–and not just our shared history, but our personal histories, in which we use our public platforms to craft shining hero’s journeys in as broad strokes as possible.

The arts, of course, aren’t immune to this phenomenon. If the act of artistic creation always carries in it a vein of narcissism, producing art in the internet age has only intensified the “look at me!” component of media production. And if most author’s first books aren’t prone toward giving shape to some kind of self-worship, then they are likely villainizing, in stark terms, the world around the author instead.

What is immediately unique about Erin Hoover’s Barnburner—a poetry collection that is also, comfortably, a collection of essays, or short stories in free verse—is that the narrators in Hoover’s poems are deeply culpable. “The Lovely Voice of Samantha West,” which opens the collection, seems at first to condemn the dehumanizing mundanity of call-center jobs, until the narrator suggests that it is only themselves who are too inhuman to participate in this specific corporate culture. “Her voice on the phone had a human response for me,” the narrator says of their last conversation with a coworker, “but I was unable to explain why I left.”

Throughout the book, in fact, there is a subtle (or occasionally unsubtle) suggestion that while the world is deeply flawed, the poems’ protagonists are no better. “My poems are / a murder story,” says Hoover in “Reading Sappho’s Fragments.” “Clear immediately that / someone will kill / someone else.”

“As I think about these poems, I think about the poetics of anger,” writes Kathryn Neurenberger in Barnburner’s introduction. As she suggests, Hoover’s toolkit—or perhaps her palette—is a layering of many different veins of anger. And while anger as a linguistic device might often feel easy, or lacking in complexity, the poems in Barnburner are at their most potent when Hoover displays her ability to shift her rage midstream.

A cutting example plays out in the short stanzas of “The Evacuation Shadow,” describing a youth spent near Three Mile Island as “a child pinned to the evacuation / shadow my parents didn’t have the means to leave.” Many of Hoover’s poems are localized in specific geographies, and for her narrators (which may be, but do not have to be, Hoover herself) these locations seem to be akin, always, to traumas tied to landscape. “I imagine someone / pulled my infant body close / as the countryside emptied  / with its fear around us,” Hoover says, but a stanza later this distinctly American horror spins outward into the larger world of nuclear devastation: “in the still-standing block of apartments of Ukraine […] Chernobyl permanently blights / the Soviet breadbasket.”

For many it would be provocative enough to end here, having painted a unified portrait of modern societies living in the shadow of environmental chaos. But in the central movement that defines Barnburner, Hoover then aims her criticism inward: “I began to leave the place / I lived from the day I was / born,” she says. The self-preservation she describes isn’t valorous—instead, she suggests, it perpetuates an ignorance, and a damning ineffectualness. “Like adults / we children pretended the cornstalks  / could be fine,” Hoover says. “No choice but to count / our own bodies as safe to roam / inside, protected in our skin.”

Hoover’s voice is neither indulgent nor romantic; its “poetics of anger” have no room for either. Instead there is sometimes tiredness, or resignation—but more often it is the simple, plainspoken presentation of discomforting ideas that forms the central aesthetic.  “With Gratitude for Those Who Have Made This Book Possible,” the book’s penultimate poem, encapsulates this simply: “I’ve got a story for you where I’m the asshole / and the other assholes in it are my friends.”

No discussion of a protagonist’s poverty, defamation, or existential helplessness goes without comparison to those who’ve got it worse. The most venomous screeds against former lovers, the cruelty of strangers, or even a lowly ATM mugger are still woven through with the idea that everyone plays their part in creating the larger murk of unhappiness and desperation that is, more and more, becoming the real shared truth of life in our modern world.

Hoover’s most obviously autobiographical poems often reflect on the dual nature of anger, especially as it relates to womanhood. At one end, Hoover seems to describe her rage and willingness to enter conflict as a burden beyond her control: “Sometimes one person is the gravitational center / of shit going wrong,” she suggests in “Recalibration,” describing an encounter with violent young men in a bodega in Brooklyn. But despite the fact that many of her poems describe a life lived in “crosshairs”—running through from her would-be attackers, or plagued in the virtual world of online stalkers as “a human zip file”—Hoover still acknowledges guilt that she doesn’t do enough to combat injustice where she sees it. “More often then I’ll admit, I pass by an instance where I know I should stop […] and I go on past,” she says, describing scenes of people in need at the end of “Recalibration.” “And though I sometimes circle back, by then,  / of course, by then, / whoever it was is gone.”

The opening of Barnburner explains the title as a Dutch term for “one who destroys all to get rid of a nuisance.” What is perhaps most impressive is that Hoover plays the part of both nuisance and destroyer with equal nuance, privileging neither, weighing judgment on both. “The wheel stops for us,” she says in “The Valkryie,” the collection’s closing poem. There is little doubt who “us” refers to. In Hoover’s poems, we’re all lashed to the same wheel.

The Poetics of Anger: Erin Hoover’s Barnburner was last modified: November 19th, 2018 by Keith McCleary
0 comment
0
Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
Avatar
Keith McCleary

Keith McCleary is a writer and graphic designer from New York, currently living in Southern California. He is the author of several graphic novels, as well as assorted prose, poetry, and digital media. His debut novel, CIRCUS+THE SKIN, was published in 2018 from Kraken Press. Keith holds an MFA from UC San Diego, where he teaches on composition and comics, and he can be found online at keithmccleary.com.

previous post
Memories Like Fairy Tales, or Fairy Tale Memories
next post
Reading Sickness

You may also like

The Hook and the Haymaker by Jared Yates Sexton

May 29, 2015

Eclogues by Graeme Bezanson

January 19, 2016

Too Many Gates: A Conversation w/ Kelly Schirmann

October 24, 2016

Obsessive, Recursive Violence and Concentration: Charlene Elsby’s Hexis

December 5, 2019
Facebook Twitter Instagram

Recent Comments

  • parri Loved the article. Beautifully captured..stay strong. Something must await for you at the end of this path..

    How Bodybuilding Ruined My Life ·  April 2, 2021

  • Waterlily Heartbreaking, real, and often so vivid. Parents, family, the pain and the damage we carry for them and from them. There is a black void where bits and pieces of our soul take leave to as we watch our...

    Descansos ·  April 2, 2021

  • Neo G I hsve to check this out! Is that doom on the cover!!

    Dskillz Harris & Chile_madd – The Next Episode ·  March 28, 2021

Featured Columns & Series

  • The Birds
  • Dinnerview
  • WOVEN
  • Variations on a Theme
  • BLACKCACKLE
  • COVID-19
  • Literacy Narrative
  • Mini-Syllabus
  • Their Days Are Numbered
  • On Weather
  • Disarticulations
  • The Waters
  • Session Report series
  • Birdwolf
  • Comics I've Been Geeking Out On
  • Small Press Releases
  • Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like)
  • The Poetics of Spaces
  • Tales From the End of the Bus Line
  • Fog or a Cloud
  • 30 Years of Ghibli
  • Cooking Origin Stories
  • Food and Covid-19
  • YOU MAKE ME FEEL
  • Ludic Writing
  • Best of 2019
  • The Talking Cure
  • Stars to Stories
  • DRAGONS ARE REAL OR THEY ARE DEAD
  • Foster Care
  • LEAKY CULTURE
  • Jem and the Holographic Feminisms
  • D&D with Entropy

Find Us On Facebook

Entropy
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

©2014-2021 The Accomplices LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Read our updated Privacy Policy.


Back To Top