Erin Hoover is the author of the poetry collection Barnburner. Barnburner is the winner of the 2017 Antivenom Poetry Award from Elixir Press.
A 2018 Florida Book Award medalist
Named a “favorite poetry book of 2018” by Largehearted Boy and by The Adroit Journal
A Sundress Publications “Best Dressed” selection
Featured by Ours Poetica
“Hoover exhumes the skeletons buried neatly behind the white picket fences of modern America in a debut that is rife with outspoken disillusionment. … [This] candid portrait of normalized cruelty is likely to get readers to question their own malignant perceptions and passivity in the face of injustice.” [Read the full review]
— Publishers Weekly
“Hoover’s debut poetry collection is a fitting attempt to kick down staid, prim, even academic poetic doors.” [Read the full review]
— Booklist
Now available
Small Press Distribution
Amazon
Indiebound
Interviews About Barnburner
The Rumpus
Adroit Journal
Arkana
Queen Mob’s Teahouse
The Drum podcast
Enjoy Your Life! podcast
Largehearted Boy “Book Notes”
The Pinch
Rob McLennan
Connotation Press
Tallahassee Magazine
More Praise:
“Erin Hoover’s premier collection, Barnburner, is a lot to take in — like a lunch buffet when you’re used to packing a salad from home. … These are more than personal poems; they are poems of broader witness, and reading them is a clarifying and empowering act.” [Read the full review]
— Karen Craigo
“What is immediately unique about Erin Hoover’s Barnburner—a poetry collection that is also, comfortably, a collection of essays, or short stories in free verse—is that the narrators in Hoover’s poems are deeply culpable. … Hoover plays the part of both nuisance and destroyer with equal nuance, privileging neither, weighing judgment on both. ‘The wheel stops for us,’ she says in ‘The Valkyrie,’ the collection’s closing poem. There is little doubt who ‘us’ refers to. In Hoover’s poems, we’re all lashed to the same wheel.” [Read the full review]
— Keith McCleary, Entropy
“These poems are witness to our raging, hopeless quest for this kind of order: the men who destroy the nuisance of women who want equality; the powerful who destroy the nuisance of the poor who want justice; the capitalism that destroys the nuisance of our irrevocable need for the earth—and in the most guttural irony, the lost who seek peace and understanding in this mess, and in the process destroy themselves.” [Read the full review]
— Dina Strasser, EcoTheo
“Perhaps more than anything, what propels both of these collections and poets forward is fire. The smoldering fire built of their frustrations as they fight to become full-throated female poets in the millennial age. … Of course Hoover’s title, Barnburner, is the first sign of this theme, and in the front of book an epigraph from the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins explains: ‘According to an old story, there was once a Dutchman who was so bothered by rats that he burned down the barn to get rid of them. Thus a barn burner became one who destroyed all in order to get rid of a nuisance.’ But there are so many ‘nuisances’ to name in Hoover’s collection that they overwhelm, and so she puts her own twist on this concept, her goal becoming instead to burn everything for the purpose of saving just one precious thing: the self.” [Read the full review]
— Julia Bouwsma, Poetry Northwest (reviewed with Analicia Sotelo’s Virgin)
“There is an impotent rage buried in the female body and boiling to the surface. The anger runs the length of each poem, like a cigarette burned down and snubbed out.”
— Jayme Russell, Pleiades
“Barnburner is replete with powerful and timely character studies. Each character, whether a bad boss, a junkie, a peer on a different path, a boyfriend, or a mugger is examined with the same mordant empathy Hoover is incredibly adept at employing.” [Read the full review]
— Peter H. Michaels, PANK
“Barnburner implores the reader not only to question, but to deconstruct a flawed cultural system.” [Read the full review]
— Stephanie Walls, Grist Journal
“Barnburner centers on … internal and social conflict without providing an answer. These poems exist somewhere in between, inhabiting the only livable space, it seems, between extremes. These poems speak to young, working women and the ideal they are both striving for and working against. If you enjoy poetry that engages with place and gender, such as that of Olivia Gatwood and Stacey Waite, then Barnburner is undoubtedly for you.” [Read the full review]
— Rachel Roupp
“Even as they explore a wide range of topics—our fraught relationship with the technologies we have created, our desperate source for love in all the wrong places, our self-medication, our work-lives, our hunger for that which outlives us (whether children or creative work)—the poems in Barnburner form a cohesive whole. … In short, these are poems that no reader should miss, poems that make us wince and sober us up.” [Read the full review]
— Devon Balwit, Glass: A Journal of Poetry
“Literary authenticity is weird. How can ink on a page transmit a vivid sense of the interior life of a vulnerable stranger? Erin Hoover’s debut collection, Barnburner, nevertheless pulls off that endlessly moving trick by conveying, with intelligence, humor, and riveting detail, the crises of a woman who ‘began to leave the place/ I lived from the day I was born.'” [Read the full review]
— Lesley Wheeler, Revolute
Read Kathyrn Nuernberger’s introduction