HOGG

The great American poet, Hayden Carruth, wrote: “The publication of the original Hogg Poems and Drawings edition was an event of signal importance, registered as such in the consciousness of readers throughout North America. To say the least, Hogg has become an extraordinary cultural personage in our conspectus.” This all-new double-volume edition – with poems refined and refreshed and added to over years, and a selection of original and new drawings – is the final presentation of Hogg brought up-to-date, with Hogg in Toronto, Jerusalem, and Leningrad. He sets out in the first book to seek redemption, such as he might hope to find it through a woman, in our world and times. Traveling toward the sun, he goes to Jerusalem where he anticipates the word would be Holy Holy Holy… And then in book two, again through love, he goes out into the world to enter a dark winter state of Russian police surveillance where he finds that the word is Ice Ice Ice. These two intense love stories, told in a range of rhythms and forms – these Hogg poems and Hogg drawings – comprise an existentialist epic without equal, indispensable in their moment: which always is now.