Someone's Utopia

by Joe Hall

"Joe Hall's poignant, visceral, and historically driven third collection of poetry, Someone's Utopia forces us to look closely at the work-a-day world inside from which we are building our lives or letting them be built for us."

Genres: Poetry

162 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2018

About the author

Joe Hall is the author of five books of poetry, including Someone's Utopia (2018) and Fugue & Strike (forthcoming). His poems, reviews, and scholarship have appeared in Poetry Daily, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Postcolonial Studies, Peach Mag, terrain.org, PEN America Blog, Poetry Northwest, Ethel Zine, Gulf Coast, Best Buds! Collective, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. He has taught poetry workshops for teachers, teens, and workers through Just Buffalo and the WNYCOSH Worker Center.

http://www.blackocean.org/hall/

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm giving this 5 stars. Fuck it.

[Mike Scalise · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book's essentially a grand experiment in poetry as journalism, and the results are pretty breathtaking. Hall takes his love poet's sensibility and points it at America's work and more importantly, it's workers, creating a rare, electric space for a chorus of voices--both current and historical--to rise and sing what it means to clock in to work but never quite clock out. The resulting poems are so expansive and ambitious, both formally and in content. Yet they're still held together by Hall's innate super-power as a writer--militant intimacy that can't help but make you lean in close to each line. Will be coming back to this one quite a bit.

[Greg Bem · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mess of a book, swirling the phantasmic of history with the chains of the present. Highly engaging, barringly unapproachable, and a swift knee-bash to the cranium (worth) of insight and intellect. Shows the dark road to hell that Hall is capable of, while also cunningly bouncing away from the past works and their grotesque limelight.