Once Upon a Time at Blanche’s creates a microcosm in a small bar that caters to middle-aged farmers and mill workers. In dialogues that consist, as Nathalie Anderson noted, of “half scatology, half philosophy,” the young observer of the poems records a swath of rural concerns that spill into and reflect the larger social and political concerns of the mid-1970s—concerns that remain relevant to the world today.
Available to the trade from Igram and Baker & Taylor.
ISBN:
978-0-9796684-1-8
A man walks into a bar and says—such is the premise of Allen Hoey’s Once Upon a Time at Blanche’s. What Hoey delivers in poem after poem is a compound of down-home American wit and woe, the insight of those who have lost the game but whose brooding powers of analysis and narrative, abetted as they are by shots and beers, remain keen. Nothing is hopeless if it can be spoken about much less turned into art. The words of the various speakers are now torrential and now terse but always illustrative of the fulcrum between oblivion and awareness that many a barstool is perched on. —Baron Wormser, Scattered Chapters: New and Selected Poems and Subject Matter
Hoey’s book, pitch-perfect even when heart-heavy, lifts a voice so colossal you can’t quite believe he’s pulling it off: the voice of a whole community when it tips back its hat at the end of the day and cuts loose. And pull it off he does, speaking the unspoken and for the many who haven’t the time, the drive, the training, or the confidence to write, but oh, they have stories to tell. This is that rare creature in the world of poetry: a book you stay up late to finish, a book you can’t put down. It’s a rowdy book, a tragic book, a down-and-dirty redemption of a book, about the agonies we suffer, the hilarities and kindnesses that keep us going, the escapes we seek, the silence that can trap us, and the listeners who make that shadow of difference between despair and meaning. Really, I have to insist: read this book. —Nancy White, Sun, Moon, Salt; winner of the Washington Prize
Allen Hoey has found the language he needs, the movement of rhythm and syntax, the phrasing: he has found his style…mature, supple, functional, poetic, and memorable, all that a poetic style should be. The same hard-won maturity shows in his choice of topics and how he handles them. I see a very experienced dramatic and narrative sense at work in these poems. —Hayden Carruth, winner of the National Book Award and National Book Critics Award
Once Upon a Time at Blanche’s creates a microcosm in a small bar that caters to middle-aged farmers and mill workers. In dialogues that consist, as Nathalie Anderson noted, of “half scatology, half philosophy,” the young observer of the poems records a swath of rural concerns that spill into and reflect the larger social and political concerns of the mid-1970s—concerns that remain relevant to the world today.