Green Squall by Jay Hopler

Green Squall, poems by Jay Hopler (Yale): Hopler's Floridian terrain is as seductive as it is venomous. Amid this wizardry of growth, we find the speaker stunned into stasis and paralyzed by ennui. Much of this book centers on Desire as a figure; in the wonderful longer poem "Of Hunger and Human Freedom," Hopler further explicates this figure as mirage in order to ponder the dueling impulses toward liberty and companionship: "But how cruel it is to free a thing-to do so / Is to contradict the nature of that thing, to insure that thing's / erasure." —Cate Marvin