Forthcoming
Consent
Black Lawrence Press · May 2027
In Consent, Erin Hoover traces the events leading up to and following an incident of intimate partner violence through narrative poems that capture the day-to-day realities of coercive control and the one-step-forward, two-steps-back journey of healing.
Urgent and keenly self-aware, the poems in Consent yield startling revelations about the volatile nature of traumatic memory.
Full details will be published closer to release.
Advance praise
“Erin Hoover’s Consent fearlessly takes us to the core of a trauma that rewrites the body. Bold and bare, these poems engage in excavation of abuse through the body’s testimony … The poems keep asking what did each moment test? What will come next? Even when the court finds the truth credible, how will a person learn safety again? Hoover opens the body’s story and lets the light touch it.”
Traci Brimhall
“Every poem here relentlessly exposes the difficulties, hypocrisies, and complexities of survival. Using an inventive array of poetic forms and styles, Hoover refuses to look away, and, in that refusal, has written a book as poignant for its beauty and energy as for its unmasking of violences too often hidden. We often throw around words like ‘necessary’ and ‘urgent’ in blurbs but, in a world where the most dangerous place for a woman is in her own home, Consent is an essential read.”
Lynn Melnick
“Drawing on court documents, police reports, interview transcripts, podcast recordings, historical archives, and personal testimony, Erin Hoover’s Consent pushes beyond the boundaries of poetic imagination into something larger: a documentary record of coercive control and its aftermath … Consent arrives at what remains after violence, after testimony, after the various archives have spoken. A voice emerges, both devastating and liberating: ‘I don’t belong to this […]. I never did.’”
Iliana Rocha