Reviews of What Narcissism Means to Me

2003 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

“Tony Hoagland’s disarming poetry collection What Narcissism Means to Me has the appeal of a mean-but-funny friend, a smart aleck you can’t dismiss, he’s so entertaining and (most of the time) so spot on in his insights. Hoagland’s central subject is the self, specifically, a prickly, grandiose American masculine poetic self, or to be more specific still, what the author ruefully labels in one poem ‘a government called Tony Hoagland.’” —The New York Times Book Review

“Without compromising dignity or quality, Hoagland writes in a way that touches readers, engages academics, and excites other poets.” —The Nation

“Tony Hoagland has a smart and sassy way of thinking about America in his work. He is one of the few poets self-consciously trying to come to terms with—to find a way to think about—the apparent omnipotence and inescapability of the mass culture that surrounds us like a sea. We are endlessly swimming through its waters. His third book, with is comic, self-mocking and very American title, What Narcissism Means to Me, heads off into uncharted territory. It is his best collection yet.” —Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post Book World

"Tony Hoagland turns heartache into poetry so beautiful it makes you crave melancholy….Impossibly, beautifully, and with uncommon grace, work like this does something amazing: it entitles us to be alone." —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A Late Night Show of poetry hosted by a high priest of irony (check out the title), that is Tony Hoagland's new book. These poems are very funny, but they are also sad, sharp-edged and ambitious. They wish to be more than just amusing cautionary tales.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“If books are cold but sure friends, this one is zanier, zestier and colder than most, the kind of friend–the best kind—who’s interested in what makes you tick and who likes to provoke, usually with a well-aimed wisecrack.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“[Hoagland’s] sharp, sleek, salty poems are there for anyone who relishes that feeling of being momentarily taken, suddenly shaken, or briefly awakened.” —City Pages, chosen as an “Artist of the Year”

“Impossibly, beautifully and with uncommon grace, this work entitles us to be along.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Readers have come to expect direct, daring, declarative work from Mr. Hoagland, and his third collection is one in which his internal wilderness is again unveiled. Emotions that seem scant or are repressed in contemporary poetry—including anger and hatred—are brought to the forefront here, though with Mr. Hoagland’s work, nothing should be taken too literally. As the title of the book suggests, Mr. Hoagland specializes in contradictions, especially those sparked between self-aggrandizement and self-deprecation. Readers’ raves about What Narcissism Means to Me indicate that the poet has touched upon a voice and sentiment that poetry has been lacking for some time.” —American Poet

“In What Narcissism Means to Me, that tender yet resilient self travels through the world as if on a reconnaissance mission, easing into and meditating on the state of being human, plunging time and again into the pockets of the messed-up, American soul, fumbling for our substance at this particular—particularly distressing cultural moment…. At their finest turns the poems shimmer with their own casual elegance.” —The Texas Observer

“[Hoagland is] a poet of stunning intellectual and moral courage….This new volume displays a serious poet seriously engaged in renewing the sources of art.” —88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry

“Tony Hoagland’s high zaniness always makes us laugh, but his real substance issues from the personal, aesthetic, and moral risks he invokes in poem after poem, and from his ability to represent the truth, not just as the singular vision, but as a multivocal pastiche. He has been brilliant from the beginning, but What Narcissism Means to Me issues from a more profound engagement—with America and with the self. It shows us our age and how great poetry is still possible.” —Rodney Jones

“Hoagland’s unerring poems—scathing, rueful, tender, always disarming—move like arrows through a target—the poet and the rest of us in the target zone. And it’s exhilarating to be caught out in such a brilliant shower of metaphors, ‘So, while you are paying what is owed,’ as he says in praise of Chinese restaurants, of the orange slices that come with the check, ‘the sweet juice fills your mouth for free. / And the fortune cookie too / which offers you the pleasure of Breakage / and then the other pleasure of Discovery.’” —Eleanor Wilner

“Tony Hoagland has written a book of poems from deep inside the American empire—hilarious, searing poems that break your heart so fast you hardly notice you’re standing knee deep in a pool of implications. They are of this moment, right now—the present that we’re already homesick for.” —Marie Howe

Read an essay by Tony Hoagland at: Poetry Daily

Read an interview with Tony Hoagland at: Santa Fe Poetry

Listen to an interview with Tony Hoagland on: The Infinite Mind