The debut
Barnburner
Elixir Press · 2018
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.
Epigraph — Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins
“There is honesty in this epigraph, raw and brutal, like the narrative voices in Hoover’s poems. But there’s an irony at play here, an irony perhaps borrowing a bit from the ironies of Frost’s “Mending Wall”: Hoover’s poems don’t burn down the cruelties of a homogeneous, racist patriarchy. Instead, they make a muse of it. A muse that can be objectified, stripped bare, and put on a pedestal for all to scorn.”
Kathryn Nuernberger
In review
“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.”
Publishers Weekly
“Hoover’s debut poetry collection is a fitting attempt to kick down staid, prim, even academic poetic doors.”
Booklist
“Erin Hoover’s supple, lucid voice, her storytelling skill, and the sheer linguistic and emotional intelligence of her poems make it hard to believe that Barnburner is a first book. There are poems here about bad jobs, environmental threat, about having or not having children, about sex, violence and many kinds of coercion, and maybe most of all about helplessness and control: who has control, how do we go out of control, how do we find our way back — if we do. A political, personal, and timely book”
Daisy Fried