Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey

Book excerpt: 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.