Moony Days of Being

Poems that inhabit a world of flammable metaphors and spiritual fog machines, delivering poems that are part elegy, part glitch, part lunar broadcast. Moony Days of Being, Nathan Hoks’ fourth collection of poetry, is a surreal and tender reckoning with absurdity, memory, and the unravelings of daily life. These odes, self-portraits, and dedicatory poems fuse humor with emotional urgency as they wrestle with parenthood, intimate loss, and ecological and political despair. The book opens in a place of existential estrangement and gradually adopts an elegiac and relational tone, speaking to family, poets, and imagined interlocutors with uncertainty and longing. The title poem, a cento composed of lines from the book, weaves refrains from earlier pieces into a coda. Interspersed throughout the book are quatrains of found images captioned by lines from the poems, an intermedia form that presents a playful visual index of the book’s motifs. Hok's poems resist tidy epiphany. Instead, they zigzag and pulse with associative energy—a lyricism that questions its own coherence while inviting the reader into resonant, affective spaces. With homages to influences like Vallejo, Plath, and O’Hara, Moony Days of Being is as much a book of grief and exhaustion as it is a performance of loopy.