Praise of Hauke’s Every Living One (Horse Less Press, 2015)
“To show and to affirm the image of the world is a rash act anymore, as nowadays we read and write for colorless grammarians. Nathan Hauke, thank heaven, is a rash man, a poet who loves the precipice he finds in every image and in his mind's eye. He is the glad captive of a good world and of its graces. Every Living One tells the bright, bright story of that captivity.” —Donald Revell
“This book of poetry is an active remembering. ‘But who / can say the order of things,’ asks the poet, along with Michel Foucault. See the clear and precarious moments of sun and snow, the world of industry and nature, the poignancy of human nature. ‘Addicted to language,’ Hauke’s cutting edge tracks thought’s shining immediacy.” —Norma Cole
“In Every Living One, Nathan Hauke, like Ronald Johnson, works the compost heap left by the New England Transcendentalists—Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau all leave traces throughout this careful, delicate, yet tough-minded book. Hauke’s world is—as it should be—a more broken, more littered world than his predecessors, a world composed of as much consumer debris as natural beauty. And it’s to our benefit that Hauke has the tenacity and integrity not to turn his back on either, allowing him to take us to the numinous edge of perception: ‘There is must be a higher origin of.’ Every Living One explores the isn’t as much as the is of that possible higher origin, all while facing directly the sorrows of death and poverty haunting everyday life; yet beneath that layer of sorrow we find at the book’s core a ‘Raw knot of gratitude.’ That gratitude comes through on each page of this compelling book.” —Paul Naylor
“What if the secret heart of rural America were a still waiting, an all-but-silent psalm? These lyrics are delicate, involuted fossils of a trance-like attention that somehow does not exclude chronic underemployment, neighbors up on assault charges, and other vicissitudes of contemporary rural living. In the tradition of C.D. Wright, besmilr brigham, and perhaps Lorine Niedecker above all, these are poems ‘learning the mirror and field guide,’ becoming ‘a process of mapping’—not just of place, but also of being-in-place, an angled consciousness that pares itself away even as the lines all but dissolve on the reader’s sympathetic eye-tongue.” —G.C. Waldrep