Morte D'Author: An Autopsy (ARTS AND THEIR PHILOSOPHIES)

Literature & Fiction

Hix, H. L.

History & Criticism

Temple Univ Pr

Rational Numbers: Poems (New Odyssey Series)

In his second book of poetry and winner of the 2000 T. S. Eliot Prize, H. L. Hix uses two contrasting poetic sequences. "Orders of Magnitude" defies rationality in favor of invention in the musical sense: producing a short composition that works out a single idea. As in music, the whole composition achieves its irrational effect through rational formal structure, with 100 poems, each ten lines long, with ten syllables per line. In the second sequence, "Figures," the speakers follow their "pure" rationality, though it leads them--inevitably--into the dark heart of the irrational. The result is a ledger of love and loss, a balancing of grief's books. Every reader will recognize the accounting in Rational Numbers.

Poetry

Truman State Univ Pr

In his second book of poetry, H L Hix uses two contrasting poetic sequences. 'Orders of Magnitude' defies rationality in favour of invention in the musical sense: producing a short composition that works out a single idea. As in music, the whole composition achieves its irrational effect through rational formal structure, with 100 poems, each ten lines long, with ten syllables per line. In the second sequence, 'Figures', the speakers follow their 'pure' rationality, though it leads them -- inevitably -- into the dark heart of the irrational. The result is a ledger of love and loss, a balancing of grief's books.

If you were stranded on some far slope of Parnassus and could bring only one book to map the landscape, H.L. Hix’s As Easy As Lying would be a good choice. Accessible, erudite, and ebullient, these essays delve into the workings of the poetic mind and offer incisive assessments of contemporary American poets and poetics. Hix not only maps the landscape, he reshapes it.

As Easy As Lying: Essays on Poetry

Essays & Correspondence

Etruscan Press

“‘Nothing attested, everything sung.’ And these poems are the songs, the mournful lieder of a reimagined life. H. L. Hix’s melodies are pure; his harmonies are haunting and strange. Incident Light composes a soaring chorus from the dark and private notes of long-kept secrets.”— Alyson Hagy, author of Snow, Ashes
“Any new book by this inventive poet is cause for excitement.”—The Kansas City Star
“Hix’s eighth collection is a fine addition to this protean poet’s fast-growing (and critically lauded) body of work. Like C.D. Wright, Hix works both with highly wrought descriptive passages and with verse that sounds like regular speech cutting swiftly between them.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review H. L. Hix’s Incident Light explores a life that became “instantly mythical” after a startling revelation. The artist Petra Soesemann learned at age forty-nine that the dad who had raised her from birth was not her biological father. Her dad had died some years before; her father was still alive. Her dad, like her mother, was a blue-eyed German blond; her father was Turkish, with dark eyes and dark hair like Petra’s own. Incident Light is a biography: not an ordered account of the facts of a life, but an invitation into the dad’s devotion, the mother’s passion, the father’s honor, and especially into the daughter’s own embracing of her experience, newly understood. Incident Light testifies to the many lives that converge on one life to lend it beauty and mystery.
H. L. Hix teaches at the University of Wyoming. His Chromatic was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Incident Light: poems

“Shadows of Houses, H.L. Hix’s new collection, is both vatic and precise. Patiently looking at and through the quotidian, Hix registers the tiny and immense phenomena of change and variation the seasons and hours bring. The remarkable sequence ‘the God of Window Screens and Honeysuckle’ is a compendium of outer and inner weather—a naturalist’s neighbor’s, philospher’s, and poet’s almanac, and a source of wisdom and beauty I shall regularly return to.”—Rachel Hadas

Shadows of Houses

Business & Money

Real Estate

“Untroubled authority . . . and the talent to make us weep.”—Dan Chiasson, Poetry“He has written the most important poetic sequences published by an American poet during the last several decades. He is the most interesting American poet writing today, the least predictable and the most challenging.”—David Caplan, PleiadesLegible Heavens explores what the most intimate forms of experience reveal about our most cosmic concerns. Its four sequences act like compass points to orient a human landscape.The author of numerous books of poetry, criticism, and essay, H. L. Hix teaches at the University of Wyoming. His Chromatic was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Legible Heavens

"H. L. Hix is that rare poet who is equal parts historian, journalist, archivist, and singer."Susan M. Schultz
"Nobody now at work in American verse combines [H. L. Hix's] attraction to programmatic Big Projects (narrative, philosophical, or procedure driven) with his supple interest in older tones and forms." Stephen Burt, The Believer
First in The Huffington Post list of The 17 Most Important Poetry Books of Fall 2010.” [H.L Hix is] one of our most daring poets, his oeuvre a rebuke to timidity, apathy, and retreat in any of its manifestations.” Anis Shivani
 From "Orders of Magnitude":Songs surround us, but we hardly hear them. Jostling girls laugh in rapid Japanese. The neighbor's sprinkler fortes for the part of its arc that frets the climbing rose. Crows bicker. One woman solicits her scales, a cappella. Another sobs. Windchimes domino the direction of each gust. A broom rasps across warped, weathered porch boards. I did it, Mama, a child says. Songs fall on us as feathers fall on a river.
H. L. Hix's poetry collections have not been merely collections. Each creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts: each poem contributes to a sequence, each sequence talks to another. For readers already acquainted with Hix's ambitions, the subtitle "Obsessionals" (instead of "Selected Poems") will need no explanation: from collections that don't just collect, what sense would it make for a selection just to select?
Hix's poems were already at work rewriting and recontextualizing language from various sources: fragments of Pythagoras, apocryphal gospels, and speeches of George W. Bush. In First Fire, Then Birds, Hix keeps at the task, recontextualizing his own poems, creating a revision (seeing anew) and recomposition (putting together afresh) of a distinctive body of work. Readers already aware of this essential writer's work will find here its fullest development; others will be welcomed into the

First Fire, Then Birds: Obsessionals 1985-2010

"One of the most distinctive writers of our time."—David Mason, The Hudson Review
"The most interesting American poet writing today, the least predictable and most challenging."—David Caplan, Pleiades
Our work (as writers) is not the pursuit of fame and fortune, not self-expression, not creativity, not therapy, not publication, unless and exactly insofar as those further rational discourse. Our work is to recognize and declare the equal standing of all persons before the truth.
In his explorations into matters both minute and vast, H.L. Hix further enriches the poetic discourse through this distinctive, lucid volume.
H.L. Hix, recipient of an NEA fellowship and the T.S. Eliot Prize, is the author of nine previous volumes of poetry and five nonfiction collections. Chromatic was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award.

Lines of Inquiry

Made Priceless presents snapshots of objects that their holders treasure: a 1950s swivel rocker, a fortune-cookie fortune that reads "The rubber bands are heading in the right direction" a marble with a world map painted on it, a bread-baking pan, a bar of soap, crocheted doilies, a masonry trowel… Each object has its own story, each its own meaning. The book's contributors include artists, a banker, a retired career military officer, secretaries, a pilot, stay-at-home mothers, students, professors, and others, each with a testament in praise of something priceless. The result is a remarkable collection that honors what money can't buy, and celebrates the extraordinary significance in an ordinary things.

Made Priceless

Serving House Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hix, H. L.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hix, H. L.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hix, H. L.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Morte D'Author: An Autopsy (ARTS AND THEIR PHILOSOPHIES)

Rational Numbers: Poems (New Odyssey Series)

Rational Numbers: Poems (New Odyssey Series)

As Easy As Lying: Essays on Poetry

Incident Light: poems

Shadows of Houses

Legible Heavens

First Fire, Then Birds: Obsessionals 1985-2010

Lines of Inquiry

Made Priceless