“This book is ragged-strange and wonderful. It’s daunting and difficult. And it’s gorgeous in its rage. Hoch’s Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey is a book of our age. We’re put smack in the middle of its mess. There’s no way out. There’s been no tidying up. It is a remarkably true book that exhibits the mind and heart of a poet at the height of his gifts.”
~Cate Marvin
“In Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey, James Hoch uses deft, delicate brushstrokes to bring the light of Caravaggio to bear on stoned teenagers, stone-cutters, and other lost souls in a way that renders them so perfectly and briefly luminous that I feel the ache and ‘unbearability of loving ones who leave.’ If time is intent on dismembering the continuity of the self, the vessels of our bodies, and the ties and longings that give meaning to our lives, these poems offer a counter-spell, that—for a moment at least—‘in a half-ass way, in time’s cold wake . . . starts to sing a broken held-together song.’”
~Michael Bazzett
“I’ve been waiting a long time for a new book of poems by James Hoch. And here is the reward. This book. Poem after deeply felt, brilliantly wrought poem. Glory be! Such care, precision, grace, and image-rich, situationally charged attention in every word, every line, every page. I’m not sure I breathed the whole time I was reading Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey. No, I did breathe, and what I smelled off these pages was the scent of a Zippo flicked in the Jersey Pine Barrens or mucky water slapping the Atlantic City Steel Pier. I smelled the wrecked world in these pages. I read these poems and grieved as if I, too, just lost my mother, as if I lost another friend, and my father, and maybe my hold on what’s left of some little corner of an unpolluted world. But also here is the hope of figs and cheese and June fescue. Of sweet sons who still snuggle without any reason for fear. The world on these pages can be as cold as an Icelandic lake. It could stop your heart. But dive in. There’s something here you need. Inside, the water’s so clear you can ‘see as far as you can see.’”
~Camille T. Dungy
“‘There ought to be a prayer,’ begins James Hoch’s exhilarating new collection, and the poems that follow offer us the wide-roaming, ruin-rummaging prayers we need to help guide us across the scree fields of language and loss. This is an astonishing, beautiful, and utterly unforgettable book, packed with honed and deeply moving poems that drop ‘lead sinkers in the gray bay of self’ as a means of interrogating, among so many other things, grief, privilege, fatherhood, the solace and failures of art, the many ways in which we wound each other, and the inexhaustible desires ‘we lug our flooded selves toward.’”
~Matt Donovan
"James Hoch is a visionary, able to find meaning in everything around him—dreams intersect with fields of poppies, a brother embodies a misguided war. His language is both precise and reckless—each word like a thread he’s been gathering his entire life, which he somehow weaves into broad fabrics of sound, into delicate tapestries that somehow stand before us, breathing. These poems are alive."
~Nick Flynn
