Indian Summer Recycling

Poetry. Nathan Hauke's INDIAN SUMMER RECYCLING reminds us that the ethics of recycling inscribe also a loss of origin. In the world of thingsâ which includes people, and the language in which we describe those thingsâ hierarchy vanishes. Animal, mineral, and ultimately refuse, things are themselves the evidence of their use and reuse. Finally, everything is nature. Though forever in the present tense, hopeâ or perhaps simply tenderness?â Hauke's attention lives in the pivot between the desire to 'Love what's gone / Ahead into new noise and affection' and the 'layered reverberations of childhood hymns' ('Long gone lonesome'). In their sway between blue's refrains and the language of depiction, the poems in INDIAN SUMMER RECYCLING are beautifully true in their anguish.â Claudia Keelan

To undo the blind arrogance of our common-senseâ arrogance that knows what beauty is, arrogance that knows what love is worth and what is worthy of loveâ we need a poetry that gets tangled in the tangled roots. Nathan Hauke's INDIAN SUMMER RECYCLING is a book of such poems. They offer us a singular devotion that occurs in countless forms, a religion that asks 'for the widest definition of presence' ('New River train'). Such religion puts the eye before the idea, and each idea has a visage, has a face, and looks back; such religion puts the family dog before lifeless dogma. Poems so turned toward life remind us that we still are learning how to live, and must take the book's dearest advice: 'Count yourself one among so many blessings / A vessel to be filled and laid to waste' ('Gunshots up the ridge'). No eternal ease, no heavenly comfort hereâ we are given just the gifts that are the days, just the loving harm that is our harmony.â Dan Beachy-Quick

If the word takes root, & the phrase finds traction to stay on the page, as we read along we thank Nathan Hauke for giving us the trail that is INDIAN SUMMER RECYCLING. A way into words that deepens our joy, gratitude, & clarity for our impermanent life in this world. Composting the ghostly reverberations of what is heard, & seen. Composing, decomposing, partnering in the dance of presence and absence. A poetry where even the cross-outs sing (softly). This is a beautiful blues musicâ of Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, & John Miltonâ reclaiming the moment when spirit speaks, speaking through the moment most clearly in its erasure, its disappearance. Places peopled deeply. A sustaining domesticity, an undercurrent of familial affection. Hauke's is an ethical way of writing, with deep roots in early American literature. The way to the heights is word by word, step by step.â Hank Lazer