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Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets
Hosts and Guests: Poems
An exciting new collection from a poet whose debut was praised by Colorado Review as "a seduction by way of small astonishments"
Nate Klug has been hailed by the Threepenny Review as a poet who is "an original in Eliot's sense of the word." In Hosts and Guests, his exciting second collection, Klug revels in slippery roles and shifting environments. The poems move from a San Francisco tech bar and a band of Pok�mon Go players to the Shakers and St. Augustine, as they explore the push-pull between community and solitude, and past and present. Hosts and Guests gathers an impressive range: critiques of the "immiserated quiet" of modern life, love poems and poems of new fatherhood, and studies of a restless, nimble faith. At a time when the meanings of hospitality and estrangement have assumed a new urgency, Klug takes up these themes in chiseled, musical lines that blend close observation of the natural world, social commentary, and spiritual questioning. As Booklist has observed of his work, "The visual is rendered sonically, so perfectly one wants to involve the rest of the senses, to speak the lines, to taste the syllables."
Nate Klug has been hailed by the Threepenny Review as a poet who is "an original in Eliot's sense of the word." In Hosts and Guests, his exciting second collection, Klug revels in slippery roles and shifting environments. The poems move from a San Francisco tech bar and a band of Pok�mon Go players to the Shakers and St. Augustine, as they explore the push-pull between community and solitude, and past and present. Hosts and Guests gathers an impressive range: critiques of the "immiserated quiet" of modern life, love poems and poems of new fatherhood, and studies of a restless, nimble faith. At a time when the meanings of hospitality and estrangement have assumed a new urgency, Klug takes up these themes in chiseled, musical lines that blend close observation of the natural world, social commentary, and spiritual questioning. As Booklist has observed of his work, "The visual is rendered sonically, so perfectly one wants to involve the rest of the senses, to speak the lines, to taste the syllables."
- GenresPoetry
97 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 15, 2020
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44 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 4, 2021
Klug is a wonderful poet of attention, attending the world without and the emotional world within, all at the intersection of the mundane and the divine.
November 10, 2020
At his best, Nate Klug balances poetic complexity with direct expression. He has a genuine gift for pyrotechnical imagery that, when deployed well, makes his work evocative and moving. Some of the poems in this book, however, feel more like exercises than vital and real experience, and the impact of the collection as a whole suffers for it. Those interested in exploring Klug's genius might start elsewhere.
January 28, 2021
The poems in Hosts and Guests are quiet, observational ones for the most part. The writing is subtle and precise. Overall though the collection is too quiet and too subtle for my tastes, but I am willing to reconsider that estimation with a reread in the not too distant future. Perhaps my evaluation of this collection suffers because I so admire Klug's earlier collection, Anyone, in which the writing seems more vigorous and the relationship between the contemplating mind of the speaker and the exterior events observed is so intricate, fascinating, and philosophical. My expectation was for more of these qualities in Host and Guests.
On this first journey through, the poems that stood out to me were: "Hosts and Guests," "Aporia," "Potholes," "First Lent in California," "Face to Face," "The Proof Cloth," and "Convert (II)."
Lastly, I will note that poems like "The Proof Cloth" and "Three Months" prove that a skilled poet certainly can write movingly about an infant child without falling into sentimentality and gooeyness. Both of these (and a couple others) were striking for their precise observations and details.
On this first journey through, the poems that stood out to me were: "Hosts and Guests," "Aporia," "Potholes," "First Lent in California," "Face to Face," "The Proof Cloth," and "Convert (II)."
Lastly, I will note that poems like "The Proof Cloth" and "Three Months" prove that a skilled poet certainly can write movingly about an infant child without falling into sentimentality and gooeyness. Both of these (and a couple others) were striking for their precise observations and details.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews