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Moony Days of Being
Poems that inhabit a world of flammable metaphors and spiritual fog machines, delivering poems that are part elegy, part glitch, part lunar broadcast.
Moony Days of Being, Nathan Hoks’ fourth collection of poetry, is a surreal and tender reckoning with absurdity, memory, and the unravelings of daily life. These odes, self-portraits, and dedicatory poems fuse humor with emotional urgency as they wrestle with parenthood, intimate loss, and ecological and political despair.
The book opens in a place of existential estrangement and gradually adopts an elegiac and relational tone, speaking to family, poets, and imagined interlocutors with uncertainty and longing. The title poem, a cento composed of lines from the book, weaves refrains from earlier pieces into a coda. Interspersed throughout the book are quatrains of found images captioned by lines from the poems, an intermedia form that presents a playful visual index of the book’s motifs.
Hok's poems resist tidy epiphany. Instead, they zigzag and pulse with associative energy—a lyricism that questions its own coherence while inviting the reader into resonant, affective spaces. With homages to influences like Vallejo, Plath, and O’Hara, Moony Days of Being is as much a book of grief and exhaustion as it is a performance of loopy.
Moony Days of Being, Nathan Hoks’ fourth collection of poetry, is a surreal and tender reckoning with absurdity, memory, and the unravelings of daily life. These odes, self-portraits, and dedicatory poems fuse humor with emotional urgency as they wrestle with parenthood, intimate loss, and ecological and political despair.
The book opens in a place of existential estrangement and gradually adopts an elegiac and relational tone, speaking to family, poets, and imagined interlocutors with uncertainty and longing. The title poem, a cento composed of lines from the book, weaves refrains from earlier pieces into a coda. Interspersed throughout the book are quatrains of found images captioned by lines from the poems, an intermedia form that presents a playful visual index of the book’s motifs.
Hok's poems resist tidy epiphany. Instead, they zigzag and pulse with associative energy—a lyricism that questions its own coherence while inviting the reader into resonant, affective spaces. With homages to influences like Vallejo, Plath, and O’Hara, Moony Days of Being is as much a book of grief and exhaustion as it is a performance of loopy.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
Published April 7, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 27, 2026
"Congratulations asshole / You’ve detached yourself from life / Seventy-eight percent of the way / The hard part is still to come / So do you want another shot At decoding the echoes / Of the rattling pebbles / Or would you rather sit there / Letting the faucet run / Until it starts to snow?"
Could Hoks' fourth collection of poems be his best collection of poems? Many are saying so. I recommend reading all four books in a row, in a field, after a storm, with a notepad nearby, and an old radio, playing a station you'll never be able to locate again.
Could Hoks' fourth collection of poems be his best collection of poems? Many are saying so. I recommend reading all four books in a row, in a field, after a storm, with a notepad nearby, and an old radio, playing a station you'll never be able to locate again.
May 26, 2026
Strange, funhouse poems from the elastic castle of middle age. I forget who described whose poems as dancing over the abyss. Well, sometimes, the line breaks here skid over that abyss the slide back to the kitchen with a wink. The book seems built to bring us to “Poem for Wendy’s Eyes,” into a moment where the whole idea of possibility in the world is annihilated and reborn in every blink of the beloved. I know reviewers are supposed to maintain some kind of equipoise. What if they don’t?
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews