80 pages / 5.50 x 8.50 inches / no illustrations
Poetry / American-General | Poetry / Death, Grief, Loss | Poetry / Family
Finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize
With Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey, James Hoch gives readers a heart-lugged romp and a work of resistance, conversing with the interstices of public and personal histories and identities in the context of ecological deterioration. Drawing on emotional experiences prompted by his brother’s going to war in Afghanistan, the death of his mother from ovarian cancer, and the raising of his sons, Hoch investigates the difficulty of loving and of making beauty in times of crisis when faced with knowledge of its limitations and necessity. Lyrical and meditative, intense and intimate, his poems evoke landscapes with views of the New York water supply system, industrialization along the Hudson River, and the geology of the Palouse in the Pacific Northwest.
A bare-knuckled argument for the sublime in the context of war and environmental degradation, Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey asserts the redemptive power of art as survival.
James Hoch is the author of Miscreants and A Parade of Hands. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, Poetry Daily, Tin House, and many other publications. Originally from New Jersey, he resides in the Hudson Valley and is professor of creative writing at Ramapo College and guest faculty at Sarah Lawrence College.
“This book is ragged-strange and wonderful. It’s daunting and difficult. And it’s gorgeous in its rage. Hoch’s Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey is a book of our age. We’re put smack in the middle of its mess. There’s no way out. There’s been no tidying up. It is a remarkably true book that exhibits the mind and heart of a poet at the height of his gifts.”
—Cate Marvin
“In Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey, James Hoch uses deft, delicate brushstrokes to bring the light of Caravaggio to bear on stoned teenagers, stone-cutters, and other lost souls in a way that renders them so perfectly and briefly luminous that I feel the ache and ‘unbearability of loving ones who leave.’ If time is intent on dismembering the continuity of the self, the vessels of our bodies, and the ties and longings that give meaning to our lives, these poems offer a counter-spell, that—for a moment at least—‘in a half-ass way, in time’s cold wake . . . starts to sing a broken held-together song.’”
—Michael Bazzett
“I’ve been waiting a long time for a new book of poems by James Hoch. And here is the reward. This book. Poem after deeply felt, brilliantly wrought poem. Glory be! Such care, precision, grace, and image-rich, situationally charged attention in every word, every line, every page. I’m not sure I breathed the whole time I was reading Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey. No, I did breathe, and what I smelled off these pages was the scent of a Zippo flicked in the Jersey Pine Barrens or mucky water slapping the Atlantic City Steel Pier. I smelled the wrecked world in these pages. I read these poems and grieved as if I, too, just lost my mother, as if I lost another friend, and my father, and maybe my hold on what’s left of some little corner of an unpolluted world. But also here is the hope of figs and cheese and June fescue. Of sweet sons who still snuggle without any reason for fear. The world on these pages can be as cold as an Icelandic lake. It could stop your heart. But dive in. There’s something here you need. Inside, the water’s so clear you can ‘see as far as you can see.’”
—Camille T. Dungy
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