“Youlike to think that you can protect your children,” Dan Flannigan begins hisstory of betrayal and revenge. “It’s a lie.” Five years after a drunk driverkills Dan’s ten-year-old son and gets off with a slap on the wrist, Dan isdrawn into tailing a friend’s husband to catch him in adultery. Dan reluctantlyagrees and quickly finds himself a suspect in the death of her husband. Withthe help of two friends, Dan attempts to stay ahead of the police and discoverwho framed him—and why. Much as he tries to remain focused on his current trouble,Dan’s mind replays his quest for revenge against the man who killed his son. Ina show-down at a deserted lodge in the Pocono Mountains, Dan discovers just howdeeply the betrayal goes.
Or available from the author (hoeya@comcast.net): $20 (discount) + 2.50 shipping. PayPal only.
Earle Mackey has a secret—one he’s kept for thirty years, even from his wife and closest friends. Thirty years later, with the events unfolding from Sept. 11, 2001, the past comes back to shape Mackey’s present. Voices Beyond the Dead traces the history of Mackey, his wife Ellen, and his former mentor and long-time activist Thomas Del Giudice from their earliest time together in 1973 to the present, when they are reunited in suburban Philadelphia. Del still suffers from his oldest son’s death during his involvement in transporting draft evaders from northern New York across the St. Lawrence Seaway to Canada. The two men would seem to share a significant loss, but Mackey’s secrets include circumstances surrounding the death of Del’s son.
Allen Hoey's writing is utterly unflinching. Whether describing war atrocities in Vietnam, or the quieter war fought between long-married couples, Allen's prose never compromises, never shies away from the digging, the getting into the very marrow, the truth and true nature of things. In Hoey's work there's an encompassing knowledge, both through book-learning and experience, the desire to know, and artfully disguised in the voices of the characters, to impart. It is hungry writing. As a section goes forward, Allen might pull in jazz, then mythology, or the bible, then the specific experience of his fictional characters; in lesser hands, all this could just be a mess. But with Allen, it's passion, deeply felt, yet expertly controlled and focused. Hoey has a way of describing process that draws the reader in: shoveling snow, sinking a ball in pool, making tea, emptying and filling a pipe. Actions that seem so simple, yet in their description, become reasons to stay deeply in the moment, relishing the basic acts we so take for granted. In a lovely description of something as simple as how cold feels, Allen provides more--the emotional content of physical things and sensations. And Allen's poetic way with words of course remains. A description of Del recalling making a snow mound for his son Bart is so musical that it almost demands the reader go back to read it again, just for the way it sings.
In Voices Beyond the Dead, Hoey ably, bravely gives us, as one of the main characters, Ellen says “the things you don't want to see, don't want to hear, pressing in on you all the more strongly the harder you try to cut them off...” In reading VoicesBeyond the Dead, as well as Hoey’s other recent work, one thing that I've come to learn is indeed reliable, is that Allen Hoey will make the reader think, reflect, and more than that, feel deeply, experience joy from the simple act of reading, no matter how hard the subject, how painful the long journey.
—Glenn Raucher, Director Literary Arts Program, West Side YMCA
Or available from the author (hoeya@comcast.net): $20 (discount) + 2.50 shipping. PayPal only.
Allen Hoey, in his sprawling, muscular novel, Chasing the Dragon—part mystery, part monolog, part picaresque—introduces Nick Flynn, a jazz critic in hot pursuit of a mystery that haunts him: the death of jazz legend, and Nick’s friend, Wardell Gray. Stretching from coast to coast in Fifties America, Dragon is a powerful narration. Along the way we encounter many jazz icons, including Art Pepper, Coleman Hawkins, and John Coltrane. Rich in character and plot, it is mesmerizing—and never more so than in Hoey’s richly nuanced language: at times stark and Hemingwayesque, at others super-heated to a Faulknerian riff of diction, sentencing and imagery, such as in his periodic “Interludes,” monologs in the voices of various jazz greats. Like smoke in a dimly-lit jazz joint, Hoey’s language will permeate your consciousness long after you have read the last page and turned off your reading lamp. —George Drew, The Horse’s Name Was Physics Although the love for jazz comes through page after page, where a reader can hear the music through Allen Hoey´s words, Chasing the Dragon is not just a jazz history, though you could worse to read it as such. It is also a love story—whether love of the art one creates, despite the toll it takes, or the love of another person, romantic or otherwise. Nick Flynn´s love for Wardell Gray, a man he previously considered just short of close friend, is as real and deep as his love for Sarah, the woman he meets and falls for, against what he believed to be his way of life; otherwise, the burning need to redeem Wardell could never have rooted. Perhaps it´s more accurate to say that the love comes first from Wardell´s art, and then from the realization that there must have been something special in the life, and something dark and untoward in the death. It is then also a first-class mystery, with crooked cops and unreliable witnesses, dead-ends and shocking revelations—some large, some as small as can be contained in a living room, in hard talk between family." —Glenn Raucher, Director Literary Arts Program, West Side YMCA
Or available from the author (hoeya@comcast.net): $20 (discount) + 2.50 shipping. PayPal only.
Allen Hoey's The Precincts of Paradise is a book of surface serenity, but beneath the poems' contemplations are churning depths, restless investigations of ideas that plumb the felt and lived cores of experience itself.
Allen Hoey's The Precincts of Paradise is one of those books of poetry that takes your breath away. In language that is sometimes cool and exact and sometimes super-heated to a conflagration of syntax and rhythmic diction, the poems, one after the other, wealth piled on wealth, plumb both the things of this world and the things exchanged and left behind, or, more precisely, buried within, just this side of a Paradise remembered so acutely it hurts. Literally, many of these poems have been hurt into being, which is to say, the poet has been hurt into poetry—a poetry of the first rank. Whether lyric or dramatic, we are left with what we have lost, and with what we have gained. Paradise always beckons, but so does what is most human, there—in the precincts of Paradise. Dance with the serpent: read this book. —George Drew, Toads in a Poisoned Tank and The Horse’s Name Was Physics
Or available from the author (hoeya@comcast.net): $15 (discount) + 2.50 shipping. PayPal only.
Hoey's suite of poems--arising in part from a visit to France, to the scenes of Van Gogh's torture-explores the myth in the most dramatic way possible, i.e., through the stream of the painter's consciousness. What a remarkable achievement! Even in our age of great biographical exploits, I know nothing to surpass this recounting of the genius, the inceptive mastermind, of modern art, done in beautifully written poems, which I recommend wholeheartedly to everyone's attention. —Hayden Carruth, from the Introduction
Or available from the author (hoeya@comcast.net): $15 (discount) + 2.50 shipping. PayPal only.
What Persists is a book by a poet skilled in several voices, each of which manifests itself powerfully in poems arising from the desolations of separation, loss, isolation, and loneliness.... What he teaches is the Heraclitan premise that a man's fate is his character—and that loneliness is a man's fate, one which, if we are not careful, may transform us into self-predators as well as into the terror of others. Hoey's vision is a complexly ironic admixture of rage and tenderness, fear, self-anger, one which proposes solitude and loneliness as both curse and redemption, so that in the end the poet can counsel himself to "never harden to loss." —John Engels Allen Hoey's What Persists takes a leap beyond his own fine first book. Already in A Fire in the Cold House of Being Hoey demonstrated intelligence, skill with both meter and free verse, a sure sense of poetic shape, and a talent for natural description. Perhaps the two areas in which Hoey has grown the most are technical virtuosity and emotional depth. Not many poets can claim either attribute; fewer still can manage both, so that the technical skill serves as a tool for the exploration of emotion.... Poets who can adroitly handle the stanza form of Yeats' "The Wild Swans at Coole" (as in "Coole Park," the final poem in What Persists) usually please us by their finesse, not their power. What Persists offers both finesse and power. With this outstanding second book, Allen Hoey belongs on anyone's short list of the best American poets under the age of sixty. —David Dooley
Or available from the author (hoeya@comcast.net): $10 + 2.50 shipping. PayPal only.
Allen Hoey’s first full-length collection...contains more compassion, diversity, and skill than the fifth book or the tenth book by most older poets. Ranging from free verse to formal structures but never straying far from an anchoring pentameter or tetrameter line, Hoey’s subtle lyricism sounds most like the speech of the straightforward, wry upstate New York and New England folks he prefers to write about…. Hoey seems to know that at the core of the storyteller’s gift is the ability to subordinate one’s ego for the sake of hearing the stories of others. Not an easy thing to do, but the memorable story in poetry always begins there. —Robert McDowell, in The Hudson Review Selected by Galway Kinnell for the 1985 Camden Poetry Prize.
“Youlike to think that you can protect your children,” Dan Flannigan begins hisstory of betrayal and revenge. “It’s a lie.” Five years after a drunk driverkills Dan’s ten-year-old son and gets off with a slap on the wrist, Dan isdrawn into tailing a friend’s husband to catch him in adultery. Dan reluctantlyagrees and quickly finds himself a suspect in the death of her husband. Withthe help of two friends, Dan attempts to stay ahead of the police and discoverwho framed him—and why. Much as he tries to remain focused on his current trouble,Dan’s mind replays his quest for revenge against the man who killed his son. Ina show-down at a deserted lodge in the Pocono Mountains, Dan discovers just howdeeply the betrayal goes.
Earle Mackey has a secret—one he’s kept for thirty years, even from his wife and closest friends. Thirty years later, with the events unfolding from Sept. 11, 2001, the past comes back to shape Mackey’s present. Voices Beyond the Dead traces the history of Mackey, his wife Ellen, and his former mentor and long-time activist Thomas Del Giudice from their earliest time together in 1973 to the present, when they are reunited in suburban Philadelphia. Del still suffers from his oldest son’s death during his involvement in transporting draft evaders from northern New York across the St. Lawrence Seaway to Canada. The two men would seem to share a significant loss, but Mackey’s secrets include circumstances surrounding the death of Del’s son.
Allen Hoey, in his sprawling, muscular novel, Chasing the Dragon—part mystery, part monolog, part picaresque—introduces Nick Flynn, a jazz critic in hot pursuit of a mystery that haunts him: the death of jazz legend, and Nick’s friend, Wardell Gray. Stretching from coast to coast in Fifties America, Dragon is a powerful narration. Along the way we encounter many jazz icons, including Art Pepper, Coleman Hawkins, and John Coltrane. Rich in character and plot, it is mesmerizing—and never more so than in Hoey’s richly nuanced language: at times stark and Hemingwayesque, at others super-heated to a Faulknerian riff of diction, sentencing and imagery, such as in his periodic “Interludes,” monologs in the voices of various jazz greats. Like smoke in a dimly-lit jazz joint, Hoey’s language will permeate your consciousness long after you have read the last page and turned off your reading lamp.
Allen Hoey's The Precincts of Paradise is a book of surface serenity, but beneath the poems' contemplations are churning depths, restless investigations of ideas that plumb the felt and lived cores of experience itself.
Hoey's suite of poems--arising in part from a visit to France, to the scenes of Van Gogh's torture-explores the myth in the most dramatic way possible, i.e., through the stream of the painter's consciousness. What a remarkable achievement! Even in our age of great biographical exploits, I know nothing to surpass this recounting of the genius, the inceptive mastermind, of modern art, done in beautifully written poems, which I recommend wholeheartedly to everyone's attention.
What Persists is a book by a poet skilled in several voices, each of which manifests itself powerfully in poems arising from the desolations of separation, loss, isolation, and loneliness.... What he teaches is the Heraclitan premise that a man's fate is his character—and that loneliness is a man's fate, one which, if we are not careful, may transform us into self-predators as well as into the terror of others. Hoey's vision is a complexly ironic admixture of rage and tenderness, fear, self-anger, one which proposes solitude and loneliness as both curse and redemption, so that in the end the poet can counsel himself to "never harden to loss."
Allen Hoey’s first full-length collection...contains more compassion, diversity, and skill than the fifth book or the tenth book by most older poets. Ranging from free verse to formal structures but never straying far from an anchoring pentameter or tetrameter line, Hoey’s subtle lyricism sounds most like the speech of the straightforward, wry upstate New York and New England folks he prefers to write about…. Hoey seems to know that at the core of the storyteller’s gift is the ability to subordinate one’s ego for the sake of hearing the stories of others. Not an easy thing to do, but the memorable story in poetry always begins there.