Tony Hoagland with Application for Release from the Dream

Join us for an all American evening with one of our favourite US exports: poet Tony Hoagland!

The author of witty, poignant poems that comment on contemporary American life and culture, Tony Hoagland is celebrated for an imagination that “ranges thrillingly across manners, morals, sexual doings, kinds of speech both lyrical and candid, intimate as well as wild.” Hoagland’s many honours and awards include the National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Fellowships, the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award and the Jackson Poetry Prize – to name but a few!

According to the novelist Don Lee, Hoagland “attended and dropped out of several colleges, picked apples and cherries in the Northwest, lived in communes, [and] followed the Grateful Dead …” He currently teaches at the University of Houston and is over in the UK on a whistle-stop tour to promote his fifth and latest collection Application for Release from the Dream. With whiplash nerve and tender curiosity, Hoagland surveys twenty-first century America and finds the wonder that makes living worthwhile.