“The dark ending does not cancel out the brightness of the middle. Your day of greatest joy cannot be dimmed by any shame.” HappinessDeathPoetryDyingHopefulDeath And DyingEndings Author:Tony Hoagland
“and when she walks into the room, everybody turns: some kind of light is coming from her head. Even the geraniums look curious, and the bees, if they were here, would buzz suspiciously around her hair, looking for the door in her corona. We're all attracted to the perfume of fermenting joy,” JoyPoetryPoemGlow Author:Tony Hoagland
“In the meantime, she is the one today among us most able to bear the idea of her own beauty, and when we see it, what we do is natural: we take our burned hands out of our pockets, and clap.” PoetryBeautySelf LovePoemSelf Acceptance Author:Tony Hoagland
“Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend, smiles like a big cat and says that she's a conjugated verb. She's been doing the direct object with a second person pronoun named Phil” LovePoetrySexRelationshipsLoversPoemGrammar Author:Tony Hoagland
“the glory of the protagonist is always paid for by a lot of secondary characters” PoetryLiteraturePoemsProtagonistsSecondary Characters Author:Tony Hoagland
“The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor.” PoetryLiteratureContemporaryPoeticRepresentationDisorientationMimesis Author:Tony Hoagland
