Indian Summer Recycling

Author: Nathan Hauke

Publisher: The Magnificent Field (2019)

"Nathan Hauke's Indian Summer Recycling reminds us that the ethics of recycling inscribe also a loss of origin. In the world of things—which includes people, and the language in which we describe those things—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, hope—or perhaps simply tenderness?—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."

–Claudia Keelan

"To undo the blind arrogance of our common-sense—arrogance that knows what beauty is, arrogance that knows what love is worth and what is worthy of love—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 here—we are given just the gifts that are the days, just the loving harm that is our harmony."

–Dan Beachy-Quick