Unopened

"Unopened," (Release date February 5, 2019) is an intriguing volume of previously published and unpublished poetry, Doug Hoekstra's latest and third book. Among its fifty-seven selections, the reader will find poems that rhyme, poems that don't, prose poems, sedokas, and yes, even an obligatory sonnet. Some are personal; some are societal. Some look inward, some look outward. Throughout the reader is invited to connect and reflect."Unopened" is divided into three selections to allow the works to cross-pollinate and the reader to choose his or her adventure -- "On the Page" (themes close to home), "Off the Canvas" (out in to the world), and "Between the Notes" (the space between, the indefinable). Hoekstra's introduction sets the tone for this journey, but the reader sets the course."Unopened" also features Hoekstra's original artwork on the front and back covers, taken from a series of collages created to reflect the content of the book. As he says in the afterword, the art and prose both reveal themselves "as a collection of fragments-memory, imagination, anticipation-broken, reassembled, and made whole."Taken as that entity, "Unopened" is a worthy addition to Hoekstra's body of work, living somewhere between the "five-minute worlds" of his songwriting canon and the short and long fiction of his prose writing. "Hoekstra writes in a style that could safely be called eclectic, but that doesn't do his either his music or his literary genius true justice. He is like a quirky art collector, putting together odd bits and ends, and then making them into something with an effect so much more than the mere sum of their collective oddities." (Midwest Book Review) "The best art resonates because it causes an emotional response - the rest is doggerel. It could be a song that makes you recall a memory, a novel that informed you, or, in the case with Doug Hoekstra, a poem that so precisely illuminates a "sudden enlightenment" - a satori." (Ink 19)