Erin Hoover

Under a Warm Green Linden, Issue 17 — Green Linden Press

“A mere hundred years I lived, / a woman trying her millennia / of threesomes, my clipper ships / full of whips and silk in long bolts, / malt liquor and floor mattresses” — @erinhoover.bsky.social, “Given thee til the break of day” www.greenlindenpress.com/issue17-erin...

Do any of the professors or journalists or teachers also get their jobs back or nah

Description of accepted AWP panel, "Unsilenced: Poetic Testimonies of Domestic Violence"

I'll be at #AWP26, with @jennymolberg.bsky.social, @michellementing.bsky.social, Iliana Rocha, and Lisa Fay Coutley

it’s even more demoralizing when the history you’re repeating is history you were around for the first time

When you buy No Spare People this month, $1 benefits @aclutn.bsky.social ❤️

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Thank you, dear Han! I loved this conversation ❤️

Flashback Friday to this kick-ass episode with @erinhoover.bsky.social, just in time for #Pride 🏳️‍🌈

Female figure reflected in doorway glass

Image of heart stickers fanned out with the text Erin Hoover AWP Book Signing, Black Lawrence Press Booths 817 & 819, Sat. 11:00-noon

I'm at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference in Los Angeles. Reading last night, panel today. Signing books and giving out free stickers on Saturday. ✨

#AWP25 @blacklawrence.bsky.social

1306: Ode to the Pink Cowboy Hat by Quinn Carver Johnson Today’s poem is Ode to the Pink Cowboy Hat by Quinn Carver Johnson.

Check out my former thesis advisee, Quinn Carver Johnson, on The Slowdown! www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2025...

You know how I know Elon Musk has no idea what he's doing? The same way every teacher who ever had to grade a stack of student essays on a deadline knows Elon Musk has no idea what he's doing

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

The NEA has released their updated literature grant guidelines. They are appalling. Tupelo Press will not be altering our 25-year mission to promote contemporary poetry and literary prose by emerging and established writers of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds, including, especially, women and writers of color, as well as the LGBTQ+, immigrant, and Native American communities. We aim to develop wider audiences for, and deeper understanding of, innovative, multi-cultural writing by essential participants in this conversation. At the same time, we undertake to enhance the reading experience itself by publishing and distributing gorgeously designed and produced books. If adherence to our principles means that we will be ineligible for NEA grants going forward, so be it. Compliance with the new regulations would be immoral.

This is how you do it. Thank you, @tupelopress.bsky.social!!!

from “Forms and materials.” Anecdote. Years ago, I visited—provisionally—a womyn’s commune nestled in Southern hills I couldn’t find now. The first nonbinary person I knew, a new friend, thought they’d live there. We ran our palms over the tufted brows of goats and roved buttercup hills all afternoon, then dined with the women, their hair shorn or gathered in scarves, someone inevitably picking at a guitar. A familiar situation, mostly, transplants from Portland, New York. The matriarch said she and her partner, a gay man, built the place with their own hands. They’d studied woodworking in books and were self-taught farmers. All gathered at her long pine table were some form of separatist—no straight men, no one who consorts with men, a firm condition.

I pondered all of my gentle male exceptions as we wound linguini to our mouths, plum tomatoes and basil sprung from the farm’s prolific garden, the group performing human noises of satiety. Aware I was a guest, I thanked the matriarch, who said, You don’t get it yet, but you will, and I said, Oh, I do, I do get it, but that was so long ago now and I am@just starting to. Perhaps, in the shadow of Dobbs v. Jackson, I could use some distance from men. Some say my hand is simply unasked for. As in: Dear sweet, please fit neatly

into our shared hetero void and behave wife-like or we will fucking kill you with celluloid and forced birth and a fetus made into a god. Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee, The very being and legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated into that of her husband under whose wing and protection she performs everything. This hand is mine, I scorn thy wing, I thrive in denial of thy desire,

nary hath struck me down. Said another mother I know who’d had IVF: How ironic to pay a cryobank. I’ve had sperm in my bed, on my t-shirt, in my hair, everywhere... sperm, sperm, sperm. There is too much sperm in America, America is run by sperm, but the vial I bought sprung me from the Romance-Industrial Complex that kept me docile for many years, and as an exit fee, it worked. Erin Hoover.

“There is too much sperm in America, / America is run by sperm, / but the vial I bought sprung me // from the Romance-Industrial Complex / that kept me docile for many years, // and as an exit fee, it worked.” — @erinhoover.bsky.social, “Forms and materials” @blacklawrence.bsky.social

"Hoover offers short, carved narratives in a sequence of compact lyric, articulating sharp images on and around domestic patters and patterns in the author's American south, and the complexity of writing through experiences that often feel far away from the possibilities of writing."

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I'll have to make this drive sometime -- it looks epic! Thanks for visiting us in Cookeville, David.

Wow! Thank you. Honored. 💕

Book cover, No Spare People, Erin Hoover

I picked up No Spare People after hearing @erinhoover.bsky.social on @ofpoetrypodcast.bsky.social and loved it. A book that feels important & true.

"It took me twenty years
but I stopped glistening.
I put the velvet away, the doe voice,
the shiny symmetry
under which I was dying."

Erin Hoover: You would be forgiven for missing just how recently River River Books began, in March of 2022. This interview with Han VanderHart about the press took place in August using Google docs. My hunch is that some readers may have known you and Amorak as poets and on social media prior to your joining forces for River River Books. Obviously, either of you could have chosen to pair with someone else, but you chose to work together. How did you decide to take the big step of starting a press? HV: I just finished reading Gabrielle Zevin's novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow-ultimately a book about two friends who develop video games together. Something this novel does well is explore how the act of collaboration affects you and your art at both an individual and community level. The novel also highlights the specialness of a working partnership—it's not just anyone you can work with intensely and intentionally; it's a lot like falling in love. When Amorak and I first met in person at AWP 2022 in Philadelphia, we had so much to talk about and to share with each other about how we thought books should be made, and authors supported-and when, after 48 hours of conversation, walking, sushi in a tent on the street, I said that we should start a press, Amorak was game enough to say yes after laughing at me, in the best way).

Glimpse into how River River Books started on @southrevbooks.bsky.social 📚💙

Really loved this interview with @erinhoover.bsky.social

southernreviewofbooks.com/2023/09/15/r...

Just seeing this now. Our reading together was one of my favorites. ❤️

I was sad to let go of my Tw***** account earlier this year. But hey, new followers. Nice to see you. 👋❤️

Sending you fortitude for all you're working on today ✊

I am getting things done and facing my avoidance and also!!!! This conversation with poet @erinhoover.bsky.social!
🥹💙🙏

from “Forms and materials” Back then, I thought the only people who understood “friend” as I did were long-gone religious sects, Mennonites in cloisters or the Shakers channeling lust into labor, turning out sweaters, rocking chairs. What word for me isn’t ill-fitting, unclaimable? A painter I know, a man who gave birth around the same time I did said we didn’t have the language as teens for what we are and to me that made sense, why he transitioned in his forties after a lifetime of femme and why I can be honest now

about what the sex I had got me, a whack a-mole, a broken lease, a yeast infection? For decades I argued with would-be and former lovers but I always gave them (mostly him) what they wanted. I gave a kiss. A layover in Saint Louis. A Sarah Lawrence girl who spills her gimlet at last call pogoing to the Stooges’ I wanna be your dog in an ex’s memory. But who will I give my honest answer to this: What are you, anyway? Sir Talleyrand, I read in the op-eds that The Future Isn’t Female Anymore, but I’ll still dedicate this volume to you— I’m not a pronoun,

an orientation, though I am that, too. I am the word continue. – I am. I was. We were. I can’t explain it to anyone who once touched me except each time, we were two people who bristled and bubbled in exact specificity. Probably. We had lives that formed us, these materials, but marriage is terminally abstract and so am I. I didn’t want women or men, only an ~ intellectual life ~ but instead I got chased from the dinner party by some Puritan goody claiming I had designs on her insipid mister, wrong idea,

but a clue to woman as domesticated pet or wormy colonial acre. Until recently, no credit without a husband’s aye. Exiled, I sat on the porch stoop or at Waffle House spitting out a twisted little laugh at being thought a slut, word like a glass bowl refusing to break—ontologically incorrect, irresponsible word. About his famous character, the woman an A awakened the male novelist wrote, The world’s law was no law for her mind. Pain is always the vehicle, pain is feminine, and for a while, I let anathema fill and vacate me, an unsteady dot on the landscape, invisible except to itself, flashing. —Erin Hoover

“instead I got chased from the dinner party / by some Puritan goody claiming I had designs // on her insipid mister, wrong idea, / but a clue to woman as domesticated pet // or wormy colonial acre.” — @erinhoover.bsky.social, “Forms and materials”

Tan "brick" background with book cover image on left, "No Spare People anniversary" text and a small notepad graphic reading "Six months old!"

No Spare People is six months old today! Thanks to everyone for carrying me and the book this far. ❤️

(Btw, the best way to purchase No Spare People, with SPD closing, is direct from the publisher, blacklawrencepress.com/books/no-spa... )

“The Act of Direct Address Is One of Gratitude”: an Interview with Rachel Edelman An interview between Erin Hoover and Rachel Edelman about Edelman's new poetry collection, "Dear Memphis."

Grateful to have spoken with @erinhoover.bsky.social about DEAR MEMPHIS for the Southern Review of Books & always grateful for my Southern editors @riverriverbooks.bsky.social southernreviewofbooks.com/2024/04/15/d...

Clipping from AWP's site of the listing for "Opening the Book" on Publishing Pedagogy," Room 2215A, Feb. 10, 9:00 a.m. to 10:15 a.m.

One more day, one more (scheduled) event. Let's do it, #AWP24 😎

Some issues with ALT this morning. First image is a clip from the AWP Event Schedule of "Our Souths: Curating Spaces Against BIPOC & LGBTQIA+ Erasure." Second image is a background image of flowers with an invitation to the Black Lawrence Press reading, February 9th, 6 pm - 9 pm, Belger Arts.

Hey #AWP24, I've got two opportunities today! I'll be talking about Sawmill Poetry Series and reading from No Spare People at the Black Lawrence Press offsite. 📚🎉