Nests in Air

Author: Nathan Hoks

Publisher: Black Ocean (2021)

In Nests In Air, National Poetry Series winner Nathan Hoks weaves research of animals’ nest-making habits into structured sets of poems followed by suites of images, creating vivid imaginative spaces. These poems are personal and political, social, and ecological, marked by conflict, contradiction, and uncertainty.

“These funny, sensitive, and wonderfully weird poems/images/complications weave the familial with the surreal, the airy with the erudite, the nest with the house. Settle in. Don’t worry. Start flying. Welcome home.”

–Matt Hart

“In this place of tenderness and threat, Hoks’s speaker attempts to take up a fatherhood outside patriarchy, to repurpose the human eye and brain for something other than a gunsight or surveillance device. With the absurdity and purpose of Lear, Yeats, and Clare, he attempts to take the crow’s eye view, without hurting anyone, without taking anything from anyone.”

–Joyelle McSweeney

“With courtly delicacy and humility belied by subtly extreme declarations and refreshingly diverse means, Hoks’s poems can be one moment deceptively plain-spoken, the next broadcasting from a typhoon.”

–Dean Young