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Barnburner
Poetry. Barnburner by Erin Hoover is the winner of the 2017 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award. Kathryn Nuernberger, contest judge, had this to say about it: "The epigraph to Barnburner is a call to burn it all down: 'According to an old story, there was once a Dutchman who was so bothered by the rats in his barn 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.' There is honesty in this epigraph, raw and brutal, like the narrative voices in Erin 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': these poems don't burn down the cruelties of a homogeneous, racist patriarchy. Instead, they make a muse of it. A muse that can objectified, stripped bare, and put on a pedestal for all to scorn. Hoover fridges that muse so that one speaker of a heroine after another is vaulted by the shock of such violence into a journey of personal discovery. There are mean-spirited, ruthless characters in these poems and, in a kind of reverse Bechdel test, Hoover wipes away their inner lives and never lets them talk to each other about anything except those they have hurt."
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2018
1 person is currently reading
521 people want to read
About the author
Erin Hoover
4 books12 followersErin 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.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
November 19, 2018
"No discussion of a protagonist’s poverty, defamation, or existential helplessness goes without comparison to those who’ve got it worse. The most venomous screeds against former lovers, the cruelty of strangers, or even a lowly ATM mugger are still woven through with the idea that everyone plays their part in creating the larger murk of unhappiness and desperation that is, more and more, becoming the real shared truth of life in our modern world."
full review here: The Poetics of Anger
full review here: The Poetics of Anger
November 29, 2018
Extraordinary debut poetry collection, informed by the simultaneous sad desperation and proud stubbornness of rural Appalachia--squeaking by on call center salaries, blatantly buying drugs in hotel lobbies, subsisting on land plagued by environmental destruction. Hoover is at her finest when tackling the thorniness of female sexuality and embodiment, although I have a different favorite subject here. (Completely biased reading, relating to me personally) I adore "With Gratitude to Those Who Have Made This Book Possible," Hoover's rowdy criticism of the NYC literary scene: "I look / at the acknowledgements of certain books / and find I've been the plus one at birthdays / for Brooklyn literati, people whose patios / reminded me of the time needed to write a book, / how the sting of rejection might be reduced / on a golden cloud. Of course I was dying to go. / I've got a talent for noticing these friends' / failures, their bakery scones staling in the sun, / not an oily kernel left of my corn salad. My job / is to notice."
May 10, 2020
The darkness and heartbreak of these poems is what will stick with me. The fear that is justified. The situational vulnerability of the poet, of women, of us all. I found "Takedown" and "Recalibration" to be especially powerful.
November 13, 2018
Bitingly dark, eyes-wide-open, tightly crafted poems.
September 3, 2018
This is such a powerful book. I read the poem “The Valkyrie” before the book came out, and it was legitimately one of the best poems I’ve read in a long, long time. I found myself coming back to read it again and again.
Barnburner is full of similarly moving poems. These are poems that speak to desperation and defiance with authenticity. “PR Opportunity at the Food Bank” speaks to the sort of experience I had many times in the nonprofit world, but the poem articulates truths that I had never realized—at least not at any conscious level—until I saw them on the page and recognized them as truths about my own experience.
I think that’s what great writing does. It always points you in the direction of the authentic, the true experience that the writer helps you recognize in yourself or in others. The truths in Barnburner are sometimes dark, and always difficult, but they are the truest truths.
Barnburner is full of similarly moving poems. These are poems that speak to desperation and defiance with authenticity. “PR Opportunity at the Food Bank” speaks to the sort of experience I had many times in the nonprofit world, but the poem articulates truths that I had never realized—at least not at any conscious level—until I saw them on the page and recognized them as truths about my own experience.
I think that’s what great writing does. It always points you in the direction of the authentic, the true experience that the writer helps you recognize in yourself or in others. The truths in Barnburner are sometimes dark, and always difficult, but they are the truest truths.
July 15, 2018
I’m not a huge poetry reader, but this was really excellent. The poems touch on such a wide variety of topics - fertility, economic issues, class/privilege, intolerance, politics - but they all flow well together. I couldn’t stop reading this, but when I was done, I went back to some of my favorites - ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, WHAT IS THE SISTERHOOD TO ME?, WITH GRATITUDE...among others, and just read them again, letting them pour over me. These poems are urgent, smart, insightful, and timely.
April 16, 2022
Barnburner is a rich, powerful collection of poems--a mix of narrative and confessional. They explore hopes and histories, nostalgia, regret, and becoming. Some of the scenes and subsequent meditations burn your fingers as you read. Others bring sadness, hurt. In every line, though, Hoover's writing is so compelling won't be able to stop following where she leads as if this is a mystery novel rather than a book of verse. It's that good. I'm sure I'll read it again soon.
January 5, 2020
Barnburner by Erin Hoover (Denver, Colorado: Elixir Press, 2018)
Erin Hoover’s premier collection, Barnburner, is a lot to take in — like a lunch buffet when you’re used to packing a salad from home. These poems, mostly longish, mostly narrative, are personal ones, and they cover a long span of the poet’s real life, from her infancy in the shadow of Three Mile Island, through adolescence and adulthood and ultimately parenthood.
The neat trick of the collection is that while it’s both narrative and personal (interviews with Hoover bear this out), the reader never gets a sense of really knowing the speaker. We know some stories, or some parts of some stories, but we can’t say we have a relationship with the storyteller.
What does come through is a strong consciousness of class, one that is aware and carefully considered. The first poem in the book, “The Lovely Voice of Samantha West,” is a prose piece that begins, “I once worked at a call center. We weren’t allowed to talk, only script-read, and I thought: Can’t they automate this?” It turns out they could, and Samantha West is the name of the automated voice that can’t quite replace live operators because her uncanny-valley verisimilitude is too off-putting to those who are targeted: “Not eager to be fooled, people recoiled,” writes Hoover.
Instantly in the book, we understand Hoover’s bona-fides. She has worked in a job where she had to clock out to pee, and where “Every three hours on the dot I stood outside in a designated area and burned the high-nicotine cigarettes I’d bought.” In the end, the speaker quits, and she can’t explain why. The reader understands, though, after being walked through the life of a call center operator.
Another class-conscious poem is “The Evacuation Shadow,” a term, Hoover tells us in the book’s notes, that refers to a phenomenon where “far more residents will voluntarily leave the area surrounding a nuclear power plant following an accident than government officials adviseor plan.” This poem shows the speaker as a child near Three Mile Island, “pinned to the evacuation / shadow my parents didn’t // have the means to leave.” The Appalachian setting of the poem is compared to the meltdown site of Chernobyl, Ukraine, where “backyards are seeded with dolls / and basketball decades // flat.”
The poem concludes,
But everyone
has to live somewhere, so like adults,
we children pretended the cornstalks
could be fine after that, the river
clear to its depths, still good
to swim. No choice but to count
our own bodies as safe to roam
inside, protected in our skin.
It tends to be the poor who suffer in disasters, human-made or otherwise; since leaving requires means, often the poor are left to make do.
Another poem that is threaded with issues of class and privilege is “If You Are Confused About Whether a Girl Can Consent,” which is based on testimony of Emily Doe in the case against Brock Turner, the privileged Stanford swim team member who raped an unconscious fellow student and got a six-month sentence from a sympathetic judge. The title and epigraph of the poem connect to give nearly a full quote from Turner’s accuser: “Future reference, if you are confused about whether a girl can consent, see if she can speak an entire sentence.” The power differential in rape is compounded by the privilege of the perpetrator.
These are more than personal poems; they are poems of broader witness, and reading them is a clarifying and empowering act. Hoover says it best in “Reading Sappho’s Fragments”:
It’s convention now
after the tragic event to say, There are no words.
But I believe there are always
words. There are, after all, bodies
and they deserve words,
anybody’s and mine.
Erin Hoover’s premier collection, Barnburner, is a lot to take in — like a lunch buffet when you’re used to packing a salad from home. These poems, mostly longish, mostly narrative, are personal ones, and they cover a long span of the poet’s real life, from her infancy in the shadow of Three Mile Island, through adolescence and adulthood and ultimately parenthood.
The neat trick of the collection is that while it’s both narrative and personal (interviews with Hoover bear this out), the reader never gets a sense of really knowing the speaker. We know some stories, or some parts of some stories, but we can’t say we have a relationship with the storyteller.
What does come through is a strong consciousness of class, one that is aware and carefully considered. The first poem in the book, “The Lovely Voice of Samantha West,” is a prose piece that begins, “I once worked at a call center. We weren’t allowed to talk, only script-read, and I thought: Can’t they automate this?” It turns out they could, and Samantha West is the name of the automated voice that can’t quite replace live operators because her uncanny-valley verisimilitude is too off-putting to those who are targeted: “Not eager to be fooled, people recoiled,” writes Hoover.
Instantly in the book, we understand Hoover’s bona-fides. She has worked in a job where she had to clock out to pee, and where “Every three hours on the dot I stood outside in a designated area and burned the high-nicotine cigarettes I’d bought.” In the end, the speaker quits, and she can’t explain why. The reader understands, though, after being walked through the life of a call center operator.
Another class-conscious poem is “The Evacuation Shadow,” a term, Hoover tells us in the book’s notes, that refers to a phenomenon where “far more residents will voluntarily leave the area surrounding a nuclear power plant following an accident than government officials adviseor plan.” This poem shows the speaker as a child near Three Mile Island, “pinned to the evacuation / shadow my parents didn’t // have the means to leave.” The Appalachian setting of the poem is compared to the meltdown site of Chernobyl, Ukraine, where “backyards are seeded with dolls / and basketball decades // flat.”
The poem concludes,
But everyone
has to live somewhere, so like adults,
we children pretended the cornstalks
could be fine after that, the river
clear to its depths, still good
to swim. No choice but to count
our own bodies as safe to roam
inside, protected in our skin.
It tends to be the poor who suffer in disasters, human-made or otherwise; since leaving requires means, often the poor are left to make do.
Another poem that is threaded with issues of class and privilege is “If You Are Confused About Whether a Girl Can Consent,” which is based on testimony of Emily Doe in the case against Brock Turner, the privileged Stanford swim team member who raped an unconscious fellow student and got a six-month sentence from a sympathetic judge. The title and epigraph of the poem connect to give nearly a full quote from Turner’s accuser: “Future reference, if you are confused about whether a girl can consent, see if she can speak an entire sentence.” The power differential in rape is compounded by the privilege of the perpetrator.
These are more than personal poems; they are poems of broader witness, and reading them is a clarifying and empowering act. Hoover says it best in “Reading Sappho’s Fragments”:
It’s convention now
after the tragic event to say, There are no words.
But I believe there are always
words. There are, after all, bodies
and they deserve words,
anybody’s and mine.
March 18, 2019
I'm saying five stars here, to me its a 4.5, but it deserves a round up! This is a very good collection. The poems striking, electrifying, filled with longing and tender hatefulness the 21st century deserves. To simultaneous want to run away from the world and critique it from the middle. Knowing that so much of life will be out of your control. I love the structure of the poems, the strong use of story and narration to create sentiment and not relying only on an interior world to describe the exterior. I will definitely read again!
Read
May 29, 2019"I've peered through
the rail arches that line the Susquehanna,
I've watched fishermen throw back shad
corrupted by centuries of seeping mines,
and thought, I'm no different from anybody
else here, still shoving broken microwaves
into any sinkhole I can find. The river
runs acidic enough to pickle animals
and wafts like a latrine. But once,
when my ancestors first saw its waters,
trees muffled the forest floor to twilight
at noon."
the rail arches that line the Susquehanna,
I've watched fishermen throw back shad
corrupted by centuries of seeping mines,
and thought, I'm no different from anybody
else here, still shoving broken microwaves
into any sinkhole I can find. The river
runs acidic enough to pickle animals
and wafts like a latrine. But once,
when my ancestors first saw its waters,
trees muffled the forest floor to twilight
at noon."
May 28, 2019
What a delightful read. The author takes the reader of mixed emotions: nostalgia, disgust, fear, and discovery. I delighted in reading about a girl who grew up in a messed up home (like most of us) and who survives day by day in a big city. Gritty and wonderful.
October 8, 2020
Love this book! It is beautifully written. Can't wait to see more from this author.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews