"Feast of the Ascension, 2004. Planting Hibiscus"
from Jay Hopler's
Green Squall

Jay Hopler:

Jay Hopler was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1970 and has earned degrees from New York University, The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He lives in southwest Florida.

About Green Squall:

"Insouciance and bravura notwithstanding, there is a solitude in this art as deep as any in American poetry since Stevens.... Green Squall is a book filled with tardy recognitions and insights. Always we sense, beneath the surface of even the most raucous poems, impending crisis: the terrifying onset of that life long held at a distance. Always bravura is connected to melancholy, fastidious distinctions to wild exuberance, largesse to connoisseurship, self-contempt to uncontrollably erupting hopefulness. Hopler's dreamy obscurities and rapturous effusions share with his more direct speech a refusal to be groomed into uncommunicative cool: they are encoded, not unintelligible. He writes like someone haunted or stalked; he wants, simultaneously, to hide and to end the anxiety of hiding, to reveal himself (in every sense of the word), to give himself away."
— from the Foreword by Louise Glück

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