Ad Hoc by Hayden Bergman

Spectacular poems from a strong new voice—Bergman’s language is energetic and surprising, beautiful and seductive; his poems are both funny and not funny, regional and universal; his voice is so strong, his thought the same, that I’ll be going back to this book to enjoy its company again and again—and I’ll be passing copies of this smart, engrossing book on to others. Really great poetry with its feet on the ground!

—Renée Ashley

“There is a flickering moment (or is it a region?) between memory and mythos–between the smile of a Florentine girl and Heaven, between a lone bird’s cry in Paumonok and “the sea whisper’d me”–and that flickering is the passage of Poetry across familiar words. It is the particular gift of Hayden Bergman to mark this passage indelibly onto landscapes, idioms, and personae. Ad Hoc is a collection of poems in love with the productions of time, and such a love is timeless.”

—Donald Revell

Reginald Shepherd called out contemporary poetry for abetting a collective self-deception: because “our reified, ossified poetic dialects” developed when most of us lived in rural settings, they are not adequate to “our contemporary urban reality.” But there is a corollary to Shepherd’s observation: because our poetic dialects developed when most of us lived in rural settings, they are not adequate to our contemporary rural reality, either. Hayden Bergman is undeceived, and Ad Hoc’s work is to undeceive. Shepherd was right that we have not yet sung up to our urbanity; Hayden Bergman is singing up to our rurality. Ad Hoc is observant, in all the ways we mean that term, and true in all the ways we mean that. One of the poems here narrates child Hayden’s mother dunking his face in the bathroom sink after he had awakened to eyes “caked shut / with solidified wheat dust.” With Ad Hoc, Hayden Bergman washes away our reified poetic dialects as decisively as his mother washed away that dust, and he restores our sight as surely as she restored his.

—H. L. Hix

Poet, translator, and critic Hayden Bergman was born in North Carolina and raised in West Texas. He earned his BA from Texas Tech University, MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and PhD in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His critical and poetry publications include The Laurel Review, Barrow Street, Tupelo Quarterly, the museum of americana, Heavy Feather Review, Gravel Magazine, Lit Pub, [PANK], and Green Mountains Review. He has translated the work of the Spanish poet Joaquín Brotons Peñasco, and has published that work in Columbia Journal. He has also translated the work of the Argentine poet Carlos Salem. Too, he has served as the Books Editor at The Literary Review. Ad Hoc (BlazeVOX Books, 2023) is Bergman’s debut poetry collection. He has taught courses in writing, children’s literature, and British literature at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He currently lives in Houston, TX.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 80 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-439-0

$18

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