Erin Hoover’s debut poetry collection, Barnburner, was selected by Kathryn Nuernberger for Elixir Press’s Antivenom Award and will be published October 1, 2018. Erin’s poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2016, and recently in Alaska Quarterly Review, Pleiades, and Tampa Review. In addition to teaching, Erin has volunteered extensively, for the Southeast Review (editor in chief), VIDA: Women in Literary Arts (lead PR advisor), Writers Resist/Write Our Democracy (PR advisor), and Late Night Library (co-founder).  She currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida, but was born and raised in central Pennsylvania. Barnburner is available to order now from Small Press Distribution.



Congrats on your first collection of poems, Barnburner, which is releasing this month from Elixir Press! I’m always curious about the process of arranging a collection of poems, about what holds a book together. Does Barnburner follow a personal narrative, or are there certain subjects that you worked with that link poems thematically?

Thank you for the chance to talk about “Recalibration” and “D= R x T” and about Barnburner, especially because the book will be out so soon!

The narrative arc with its inevitable sense of closure didn’t appeal to me for a book in which the poems are supposed to be unsettling, their questions unresolved. Instead, I chose an epigraph that could point to the thematic ties between the poems, which were already in draft form before I began even thinking about a book, and titled the book after it.

The word “barnburner” first applied to a faction of political radicals before the Civil War, so named for the legend of the “Dutchman who was so bothered by the rats in his barn that he burned down the barn to get rid of them.” I find resonant the idea of burning down something to save it, perhaps a barn, perhaps a community, perhaps a country. Even when I was a kid in rural Pennsylvania, this strain of thinking was present everywhere, I think because it offered an outlet for anger and the potential for renewal at once.


We’re featuring two poems from Barnburner in this month’s issue, “D=RxT” and “Recalibration.” I was struck by the remoteness of the narrator’s voice in each of these poems—it maintains a certain distance even when speaking from the center of a somewhat chaotic experience. As a poet, do you think this kind of dual state is necessary for creating art?

I think that this impression of remoteness in my poems may come from a paradox I found as their writer: because I was evoking morally ambiguous situations—I mean situations where it’s difficult to know the “right” way to act or feel—I had to built narratives that were very tight, with figurative transitions that turned on a dime. The thought process of the speaker(s) should be very clear, I believed, even if I was describing something like panic or rage or loneliness. As we move through our lives, people don’t usually have the luxury of looking analytically at our interior states, and perhaps you are right that I have used art to do this.  


I admire that your work confronts many current social issues such as white privilege, race, gender, and women’s issues. Is it important to you to do so? Have you always explored these subjects with your poetry?

My earliest mature poems were more interested in exploring personal emotions and relationships because that was what I could access then. I think that poets have to accumulate experiences to inform what they want to say about social issues. Whiteness, for instance, is notoriously slippery. Poets are always seeking out nuance and complication because poetry demands this from us. That takes a certain kind of maturity, even from young writers.

As readers, we are fortunate to have writers pushing the boundaries of poetry, creating new languages for dissent, who are fully up to that task. I started to make a list to include here but it became exhaustive; Jericho Brown, Heather June Gibbons, and Gabrielle Calvocoressi are just the poets I’m reading right now.

As for my own goals, I hope that the politics of Barnburner will be clear to readers. I have tried to write from a position of social engagement that I have earned. My poetry is consistently critical of privilege in many forms. At the same time, I also write about less overtly political topics. I’ve written about aging out of the ability to have children as a single person, for instance, and about attempts to connect with other people that have failed.


Do you have a favorite place, or situation, in which to write?

This is a different question for me now than it was during the writing of Barnburner since I am the single parent by choice of a very young child and I work full time. I have to pay a babysitter or find help from a friend any time I want to write. I mention this not to evoke sympathy, but because I don’t think we talk often about how the resources necessary for creativity are not equally available to everyone.

My favorite situation may be to take inspiration from events years after their happening, such as the way 9/11 appears in a few of my poems, or the opioid epidemic, which hit central Pennsylvania long before it became a national problem. Often I’m trying to use story to explore some concept or question that’s interesting to me, and what’s most interesting in the poems usually isn’t what’s taking place but the speaker’s interior monologue about it. In “Recalibration,” I wanted to write about the forms that activism can take, flawed as they can be. In “D= R x T,” it was the digital, long-distance relationship, a phenomenon that I rarely see in poems.


Any projects you are working on now that we can look forward to?

I want to write about institutions because my own relationship to institutions (doctors, schools, sites of employment, and the United States of America) changed so fundamentally when I became part of a family construed as unconventional. I’m interested in how some things that we consider individual choices are actually shaped by institutions, and how those institutions reward and punish us. I also remain interested in writing about environments: natural, constructed, and digital. I probably need to reread Foucault.


What is your favorite food?

Selzer’s Lebanon bologna is a kind of cured and smoked meat named after the county in Pennsylvania where it’s made. It can be sliced and used in sandwiches. Being from outside Harrisburg, I’m really fond of Pennsylvania Dutch foods. In Florida, I’m able to make my own shoofly pie, apple dumplings, and red beet pickled eggs. I have no choice but to yearn for Seltzer’s Lebanon bologna.