The Abridged History of Rainfall (McSweeney's Poetry) - Softcover

A National Book Award Finalist "Hopler's music depicts a human being at its most hesitant. It hymns that moment when the spirit isn't quite certain whether to laugh or cry, when the spirit grieves smiling. What strange music lives on these pages! The kind that would make Wallace Stevens proud. Repeat this with me: Hopler's music would make Wallace Stevens proud. That's a fact. No other way to say this: Jay Hopler is a majestic poet. A true artist. His is the art that lets us laugh and be sad in the same stanza--often in the same word." --Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa "'I couldn't make myself believe, ' writes Hopler in what may be the dark thesis of this dark book. And yet, what stunning evening light he shows us. Even as he is bowed by grief like 'an oak tree, its trunk warped / By a hundred years and more of wars // and storms'; even as his faith is shaken to its foundations; he reawakens 'In a combustion of butterflies.' Here is sheer lyric inventiveness in the service of feeling. By these poems, your faith will be shattered and restored, restored and wondrously shattered again." --Craig Morgan Teicher, author of To Keep Love Blurry "This is a major work of art. Hopler's vision and voice, both painfully complex because of how much of the world he allows to attach to him, to stake its claim on him, teach us we are in the presence of lasting, inimitable poems. No one writes like Hopler. And no one ever will." --Katie Ford, author of Colosseum "In his second collection of poetry, Jay Hopler's incredible ear and inventiveness with poetic form return full throttle. Even as they engage grief and loss, the poems here are funny and sardonic, not afraid to wear their feelings on their sleeves; they're a tonic." --Dana Levin, author of Sky Burial PRAISE FOR GREEN SQUALL: "In [Green Squall], an alternately ecstatic and self-deprecating speaker measures himself against a ravishing and disinterested natural world that is sometimes mirror, sometimes an unattainable aspiration... The best of these poems are truly stunning." --Publishers Weekly "Jay Hopler has what musicians call 'attack.' He enters his poems immediately, and no matter how ironic or strange his sentences become, his voice clamps each phrase to the page with conviction." --Peter Campion, Poetry "Hopler's Floridian terrain is as seductive as it is venomous." --Ploughshares "Mr. Hopler writes with refreshing passion, crispness, intensity, and wit." --Open Books "One reason why Hopler is such an intriguing poet is that he draws from a repository of everything that has occurred in American poetry since Stevens; [Green Squall] points the way to a renewal of the art." --Blackbird "I'm reading an absolutely phenomenal first book right now--actually, it would be a fantastic book even if it were somebody's fifth--Green Squall by Jay Hopler." --David Rivard, American Poetry Review "Jay Hopler proves himself a consummate and daring master of sound and imagination, bringing philosophical inquiry together with dazzling verbal gymnastics in his debut collection, Green Squall." --The Southern Review "Green Squall is a powerfully evocative book, comic enough to be truly entertaining, while the comedy also acts as an ironic chaser for the book's sadness, sensuality, and searching. Surface textures and imaginary landscapes here are dazzling." --Boxcar Poetry Review "[Green Squall] is a must for anyone who wants to rescue nature from the stagnant pool of cliche. It digs and digs until it reaches the roots of each thought, each association, each pain, each beauty. It is a simultaneous uncovering of a deeper life and the digging of a grave." --WDS Review of Books PRAISE FOR JAY HOPLER: "Despite the clutter of recent poetry contests, the Yale Series of Younger Poets remains the most prestigious, and Hopler's work is an excellent addition to a list that's included James Wright, Adrienne Rich, and Carolyn Forche." --Rochelle Ratner, Library Journal

Jay Hopler's second collection, a mourning song for his father, is an elegy of uproar, a careening hymn to disaster and its aftermath. In lyric poems by turns droll and desolate, Hopler documents the struggle to live in the face of great loss, a task that sends him ranging through Florida's torrid subtropics, the mountains of the American West, the streets of Rome, and the Umbrian countryside. Vivid, dynamic, unrestrained: The Abridged History of Rainfall is a festival of glowing saints and fighting cocks, of firebombs and birdsong.