Blood Prism

The poems in Blood Prism span a lifetime. Its three sections, "Memory," "Politics," and "Age," frame meditations on a violence-blotched world with reflections on the author's childhood and conclusions about a decades-long life of writing. "I'm 60 and still . . . alive in this world, with love and with its palindrome," one poem says. And the argument of the book turns on that precise puzzle: on evol, invoking as it does both evil and evolve, both human wrong and life as something more than mere survival. In a variety of styles--prose poems, standard and dislocated forms--Hoeppner uses "blood" to represent family and history, his surprising and richly imagistic language rendering the emptiness he calls imagination "into remains. Into what persists."