John Hodgen

Liberties, a Journal of Culture and Politics, is essential reading for those engaged in the cultural and political issues of our time. In this issue of Liberties: Michael Ignatieff - The Mind’s Emancipation; Mary Gaitskill - The Trials of the Young; Sergei Lebedev - Putin’s Philosopher: A Memoir; Michael Walzer - Moral Concern; Justin E. H. Smith – The Happiness Industrial Complex; Andrew Scull – The Fashions in Trauma; David A. Bell – The Triumph of Anti-Politics in America; Michael Kimmage – A Defense of Delight in a Dark Time; Robert Alter – Proust and the Mystification of the Jews; Steven B. Smith – What is a Statesman?; Benjamin Moser – Rembrandt’s shadows; Helen Vendler – The Poetry of Charm; Celeste Marcus – Priorism, or the Joshua Katz Affair; Leon Wieseltier – Problems and Struggles; and, new poems by Karen Solie, Adam Zagajewski, and John Hodgen. Published quarterly, Liberties, is a collection of the most significant writers today as well as launching the voices of tomorrow. Liberties features serious, independent, stylish, and controversial essays by significant writers and introduces the next generation of writers and poets to inspire and impact the intellectual and creative lifeblood of today’s culture and politics. Nobel Prize winners, leading op-ed writers, well-known non-fiction writers, rising talents, and poets from around the world are part of the Liberties series. There’s a reason why engaged citizens, cultural warriors, political leaders, opinion makers, and activists from across the cultural and political spectrum read and cherish Liberties.

Winner of the 2005 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. Grace is John Hodgen’s third book of poetry. He is a poet of extreme contrasts, offering us the dregs of despair, yet instantly recalling hope in the beauty of nature or in a moment in time when all is right, when we realize grace. In “For the Leapers” the narrator relates, “We will fall past the angels, / we will fall from such height, / our tears will lift up from our eyes. / We will fall straight through hell. / And then we will rise.” Hodgen’s poems roam through history, religion, man-made disasters, baseball, pop culture, and Wal-Marts, on paths that come full circle with remarkable completeness, maturity, and dexterity.

John Hodgen's What We May Be is a cry of love and pain (and he makes them almost indistinguishable) on behalf of the human race, its history, its future, its lovely possibilities that seem always out of reach. The poems of this award-winning poet declare again and again that the reaching itself defines the best in us, and he is cheering us on.

The poems in The Lord of Everywhere are about strength and courage and the will to hold on, about home and homelessness, and the tension that floats like Emily's feather between knowing what home means and finding our true home. These poems praise those caught between glaciers of clarity and wildfires of cruelty, those who take that "new step", which Dostoevsky called our greatest fear. These poems honour those who make their way home each day, together or alone, and who still believe, somehow, inexplicably, almost wordlessly, in love that endures, even in the flames.

This winner of the Balcones Prize for Poetry contains poems of family, love, betrayal, belief, and profound speculation. It is a poetry of long, musical lines, astonishingly original metaphor, and clear and direct voice. This is a remarkably intimate and moving work.

Out of print since 1994, In My Father's House is offered again in a beautiful new edition.