No Spare People

by Erin Hoover

NO SPARE PEOPLE documents the joys and perils of a tiny mother-daughter family navigating life on the margins. From poems about finding autonomy as a queer, unpartnered parent by choice in the South to those chronicling a generation's economic instability, Hoover rejects so-called "acceptable losses" stemming from inequalities of gender, race, and class. The book asks, what happens to the woman no longer willing to live a lie? How does language invent not only identity, but possibility? "Erin Hoover's second collection, NO SPARE PEOPLE, recalls to me the sobering effect of encountering Adrienne Rich's work in the late '80s. These poems deal in reality, eschewing the fantastic … This is a deeply intellectual and expertly wrought collection."--Cate Marvin "The poems in NO SPARE PEOPLE illuminate the injustices of income inequality, misogyny, womanhood and motherhood in America with an expanse of time and geography."--K. Iver "In the mother-daughter family of NO SPARE PEOPLE, everyone is essential--one parent, one child--with truly no one to spare. This collection explores the difficulties of such economy within our particular economy … Yet the poems do not give up, continually questioning the constraints of an American South."--Jessica Jacobs "These are hard poems in that they press far past the facile reductive binaries of good and evil, savior and saved, and into something--a lyric, a voice--that feels a little more complicated, a little more like our own world."--Kaveh Akbar Poetry. Women's Studies.

Genres: Poetry

94 pages, Paperback

Published October 20, 2023

About the author

Erin Hoover is the author of Barnburner, winner of Elixir Press’s Antivenom Poetry Award and a Florida Book Award in Poetry. Her second collection of poetry is No Spare People (Black Lawrence Press, 2023). Hoover teaches poetry as an assistant professor at Tennessee Tech University and runs Sawmill Poetry Series, a reading series in Tennessee.

Reviews

[Lesley Wheeler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book of chosen single motherhood, adjunct professorhood in the Zoom era, and other twenty-first-century edgelands. The poems bristle with zingers--about poetry's apparent uselessness, child support, electoral politics, and being "absurdly educated for a uterus"--but they're also radically vulnerable and full of heart. Her long poem about gender and sexuality, "Forms and materials," is a stunner.

[Madi Vordenbaum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to Erin Hoover for visiting Thank You Books in Birmingham, AL. It was a pleasure getting to speak to Erin and learn more about the origin of No Spare People. A collection of poems that reflect on motherhood that is the hellscape of capitalist, individualist, misogynistic, America.

Especially in the wake of COVID 19. It's timely and endearing in its honesty.

[Erica Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful collection about parenthood in our age of anxiety. The last poem, "What if pain no longer ordered the narrative," gutted me.

[Megan McCarthy-Biank · Rating 4 out of 5]

Right from the first poem, Hoover sets the tone for the collection. In these lines, she somehow captures what motherhood forces women to become. She challenges readers to acknowledge what society does to women – and who benefits from these forced roles. As readers progress through her work, we get insight into her experiences of her constrained life as a queer woman in the South. Even more so, what it means for a woman to choose to raise a child on her own. She also expresses her looming sorrow in post-9/11 New York. And when readers piece it all together, that we are learning the perspective of a queer single mother during the 21st century, we realize how profound her message really is.

Read the entire book review on the Cantina Book Club website: https://cantinabookclub.com/review/no...

Listen to the interview with Erin Hoover on the Cantina Book Club podcast: https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-8dd8m-1...