"A wonderful, fresh, and striking collection" (Eavan Boland) from the winner of the 2001 Gerald Cable Book Award. At the heart of this collection is an intense rendering of a young boy's murder and the lives of those who endured it. Reminiscent of the work of B. H. Fairchild and Larry Levis, Miscreants investigates memory, family, violence, and the transition from boyhood to adolescence in the decaying, working-class towns of New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Miscreants: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Hoch, James

Poetry

W.W.Norton&Company

"Vivid, disturbing, and distinctively American ballads and lyrics....Astonishing."--Michael Collier "Troubled young men and boys animate" these "memorable" (Publishers Weekly) poems of James Hoch's second collection, set in the decaying, working-class towns of New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Review\n“This book is ragged-strange and wonderful. It’s daunting and difficult. And it’s gorgeous in its rage. Hoch’s Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey is a book of our age. We’re put smack in the middle of its mess. There’s no way out. There’s been no tidying up. It is a remarkably true book that exhibits the mind and heart of a poet at the height of his gifts.” -- Cate Marvin\n“In Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey, James Hoch uses deft, delicate brushstrokes to bring the light of Caravaggio to bear on stoned teenagers, stone-cutters, and other lost souls in a way that renders them so perfectly and briefly luminous that I feel the ache and ‘unbearability of loving ones who leave.’ If time is intent on dismembering the continuity of the self, the vessels of our bodies, and the ties and longings that give meaning to our lives, these poems offer a counter-spell, that―for a moment at least―‘in a half-ass way, in time’s cold wake . . . starts to sing a broken held-together song.’” -- Michael Bazzett\n“I’ve been waiting a long time for a new book of poems by James Hoch. And here is the reward. This book. Poem after deeply felt, brilliantly wrought poem. Glory be! Such care, precision, grace, and image-rich, situationally charged attention in every word, every line, every page. I’m not sure I breathed the whole time I was reading Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey. No, I did breathe, and what I smelled off these pages was the scent of a Zippo flicked in the Jersey Pine Barrens or mucky water slapping the Atlantic City Steel Pier. I smelled the wrecked world in these pages. I read these poems and grieved as if I, too, just lost my mother, as if I lost another friend, and my father, and maybe my hold on what’s left of some little corner of an unpolluted world. But also here is the hope of figs and cheese and June fescue. Of sweet sons who still snuggle without any reason for fear. The world on these pages can be as cold as an Icelandic lake. It could stop your heart. But dive in. There’s something here you need. Inside, the water’s so clear you can ‘see as far as you can see.’” -- Camille T. Dungy\n“‘There ought to be a prayer,’ begins James Hoch’s exhilarating new collection, and the poems that follow offer us the wide-roaming, ruin-rummaging prayers we need to help guide us across the scree fields of language and loss. This is an astonishing, beautiful, and utterly unforgettable book, packed with honed and deeply moving poems that drop ‘lead sinkers in the gray bay of self’ as a means of interrogating, among so many other things, grief, privilege, fatherhood, the solace and failures of art, the many ways in which we wound each other, and the inexhaustible desires ‘we lug our flooded selves toward.’” -- Matt Donovan\n"James Hoch is a visionary, able to find meaning in everything around him―dreams intersect with fields of poppies, a brother embodies a misguided war. His language is both precise and reckless―each word like a thread he’s been gathering his entire life, which he somehow weaves into broad fabrics of sound, into delicate tapestries that somehow stand before us, breathing. These poems are alive." -- Nick Flynn\nWith 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.\nA bare-knuckled argument for the sublime in the context of war an

Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey: Poems

LSU Press

This is a practical, modern introductory grammar for classroom and self-instruction. Unlike Alan Gardiner's monumental Egyptian Grammar , this is not intended as a reference work, and it is designed to be as user-friendly as possible by, for example, presenting simplified forms of genuine texts rather than diving straight into the originals. It is suggested the the 16 lessons be spread over about 30 weeks study. The book is widely used in North American courses.

Middle Egyptian Grammar (SSEA Publication)

History

Ancient Civilizations

Benben Publications

This sign list is designed as a accompaniment to James Hoch's Middle Egyptian Grammar, a practical course for students of the Ancient Egyptian language.

Middle Egyptian Grammar: Sign List (SSEA Publication)

Poetry. Winner of the Gerald Cable Book Award. "James Hoch's poems contain an eerie and clarifying power that reminds that reminds me of Chardin's still lifes. Lake Chardin, Hoch celebrates the beauty and fragility of life by fixing on the luminous details of mortality. He does so through a dense but elegant syntx. Unlike most first books, experience drives Hoch's poems. A PARADE OF HANDS is so sure of itslef that raders will think of James Hoch's achievement and accomplishment rather than of his promise and potential."—Michael Collier

A Parade of Hands

Silverfish Review Press

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

Books by Hoch, James

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

Miscreants: Poems

Miscreants: Poems

Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey: Poems

Middle Egyptian Grammar (SSEA Publication)

Middle Egyptian Grammar: Sign List (SSEA Publication)

A Parade of Hands