Donkey Gospel: Poems

This was a great collection of poems, and one I'll come back to. Most are narrative poems with strong voices and fun touches of humor; I never got tired of the collection, and there are many poems here which I'd recommend. For anyone who wants some short entertaining poems to pass the time, enjoys or wants to explore contemporary poetry, or likes narrative poetry that tells a story and still leaves you with something to think about, I highly recommend these. I will say that a few of the poems are slightly risque, so it's probably not the collection you'd want to pass on to your teenage poet at home--at least not without reading it first, though I admit I would have soaked these up and loved them as a sixteen year old as much as I do now show more at twenty-eight. show less

My plan was to read a couple poems per day or per week or something, but I ended up going through the entire book in one sitting. It was like eating chips. Not entirely surprising, because the same thing happened when I read his What Narcissism Means to Me, which came five years after this one. I did not, however, have the immediate compulsion to buy five more copies of this one and mail them to friends, like I did with Narcissism. Nothing in this collection grabbed me in quite the same way as, say, A Color of the Sky. But it was still very good. Edgier. Repeated themes of sex and parents instead of friends and identity. The best metaphors, as before, involved anthropomorphic trees.

This book is only as good as the asshole who is reading it and who wants to be petted for being such a good asshole, for being quiet and doing nothing mean and admitting that it would be nice to be nice but oh fucking well, there's nothing to being an asshole so I'll just read these tony hoagland poems and think about it and go do the things that are perpetually being done.