Tony Hoagland is, by all accounts, a highly decorated contemporary poet. His work has appeared with such frequency in prestigious literary journals that seven of the poems contained within Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty can boast of original publication in Poetry Magazine. Such a pedigree is obviously rare among contemporary poetry collections, and as such, one might reasonably regard Hoagland’s oeuvre as an exemplar of the elite critical standard of today.

Hoagland’s work balances narrative description (expressed in notably simple language) with flourishes of introspection. The result is a poetic that proves both straightforward and powerful. Unlike so much contemporary narrative poetry, which does little more than describe, Hoagland’s stories serve to illustrate or develop an idea. These moments of insight often prove profound. The poem “Hard Rain,” for example, presents a critique of contemporary American consumerism, or more specifically, the idea that “even serenity can become something horrible if you make a commercial about it” (14). Such criticism is, in and of itself, worn from overuse to the point of cliché. Yet Hoagland does not merely categorize the symptoms of commercialist America. Instead, he diagnoses, weaving a series of descriptions that ultimately lead to an indictment of America for its desire to believe that “the power of Forgiveness is greater than the power of Consequence, or History” (14).

Similarly, in "The Story of the Father," Hoagland presents a vignette of a father burning photographs “after the funeral of his son the suicide” (21). Such a circumstance borders on the cliché, the over-worn, and the disingenuous, but once again, Hoagland redeems his work through his capacity to extract from the story genuine and earnest insight. His conclusion, “It is not the misbegotten logic of the father; it is not the pity of the snuffed out youth; it is the old intelligence of pain that I admire," is, at the very least, a powerful, personal, and contestable assertion (22). It stands in marked contrast with the worlds of under-developed and emotionally extreme characters that narrative poets often employ to mask the intellectual paucity of their work.

Most of Hoagland’s work explores the every-day realities of modern America. As the Jackson Poetry Prize judges said of his work, “It is difficult to imagine any aspect of contemporary American life that couldn’t make its way into the writing of Tony Hoagland.” In Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, a reader encounters poems devoted to such topics as “Food Courts,” romance, cocktail waitresses, dictators, divorce, and racial tensions. Lyrical abstraction is almost entirely absent from the book. At times Hoagland’s poems flirt with the politically didactic (see, for example, “Big Grab,“ “Confinement,” or “Disaster Movie”), but, by in large, his work succeeds in capturing the small but poignant impacts on perspective effected by ordinary experience.

Despite its strengths, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty suffers at times from poems in which description displaces potent introspection. “Poor Britney Spears,” for example, deliberates in generalities on the cultural phenomenon that is Britney Spears. It concludes, “Oh my adorable little monkey, prancing for your candy, with one of my voices I shout, ‘Jump! Jump, you little whore!” (20). Although the speaker moderates such cruelty with a second voice that says, “Put on some clothes and go home, Sweetheart,” the poem expresses its libidinous anger with a force that dilutes its call for socio-cultural retrospection (20).

Likewise, the ideas contained in the poem “Cement Truck” are obscured by its bizarre beginning, in which the speaker asserts, “I liked the monster birth of the torso and the tilted ovoid shape, the raised rump with a hole like an anus at the back” (35). This observation does not nuance the complex aesthetic question presented in the poem as to whether one can poetize an object without transforming it into “a metaphor or symbol for something else” (35). Rather, it underscores the inconsequence of a poetic that rejects the intellectual potentialities of symbol and metaphor in favor of the gritty, the crass, and the this-worldly. (See also the poem “Visitation” (52) and the speaker’s reflections on “the fine blonde purse of her pussy” and “demure little asshole” that he regretfully “didn’t spend more time with it”).

Hoagland’s poetry is not symbolically complex. It does not seek transcendental meaning in the discourse between symbols, but, instead, speaks plainly. On the one hand, such a poetic is easily approachable, and to many, Unincorporated Persons will provide a welcome relief from the dizzying intellectual obscurity that abounds within contemporary poetry. Nonetheless, the book, in its simplicity, lacks something of the beauty begotten by mystery. Such beauty surfaces in the moments of forceful introspection that function as the intellectual keystones of the volume. Yet it recedes again, all to quickly, into an ether of description that is neither aesthetically transformative nor intellectually provocative.

This dynamic, however, may well embody the most contentious (and perhaps most central) assertion of Unincorporated Persons. According to Hoagland, Narrative vanishes once it has “done its work,” leaving behind the “affectionate cousin” of “Description, which lingers and loves for no reason” (85). What constitutes the proper “work” of narrative remains unclear, but the poem “Description” which opens the volume suggests that Description signifies acceptance of human suffering. With Narrative comes “effort,” with Description, “rest” (3). It is unclear whether contemporary society has indeed abandoned effort and transcended narrative. It is equally unclear whether description, as an aesthetic modus operandi, should be understood as a station of progress or a symptom of creative atrophy. These questions remain complex and unanswered, even if elite poetic institutions have accepted his project as worthwhile.