Description: Announcing the 2005 recipient of the prestigious Yale Younger Poets prize
Review Quotes: "The Yale Series of Younger Poets remains the most prestigious [poetry contest], and Hopler's work is an excellent addition to a list that's included James Wright, Adrienne Rich, and Carolyn Forche. . . . Highly recommended."--Library Journal
"An alternately ecstatic and self-deprecating speaker measures himself against a ravishing and disinterested natural world that is sometimes a mirror, sometimes an unattainable aspiration. The dialogue in these 34 poems is mostly between the speaker and himself, allowing for pained self-negations. . . . The best of these poems are truly stunning."--Publishers Weekly "Hopler writes powerful, sometimes rowdy, always revelatory, poems about attempting to transcend the banality of everyday life."--Baltimore Magazine "The book unfolds with an ingenious rhythm, encompassing and modulating extremes of expression that run parallel to the extragavances of the portrayed world. . . . Green Squall . . . is a lively affair of the whole being."--Ron Slate, Blackbird Winner of the Bronze Medal in the Poetry Category for the 2006 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award Winner of the 2007 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Poetry Winner in the Poetry: General category of the National Best Books 2007 Awards Winner of the 2009 Whiting Writers' Award, given by The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Winner of the Silver Medal in the Poetry Category for the Florida Book Awards "Insouciance and bravura notwithstanding, there is a solitude in this art as deep as any in American poetry since Stevens. . . . Green Squall is a book filled with tardy recognitions and insights. Always we sense, beneath the surface of even the most raucous poems, impending crisis: the terrifying onset of that life long held at a distance. Always bravura is connected to melancholy, fastidious distinctions to wild exuberance, largesse to connoisseurship, self-contempt to uncontrollably erupting hopefulness. Hopler's dreamy obscurities and rapturous effusions share with his more direct speech a refusal to be groomed into uncommunicative cool: they are encoded, not unintelligible. He writes like someone haunted or stalked; he wants, simultaneously, to hide and to end the anxiety of hiding, to reveal himself (in every sense of the word), to give himself away."--from the Foreword by Louise Glück