What Narcissism Means to Me: Selected Poems - Softcover

'He belongs to that wagon-circle of American poets who believe in a "common reader"...Hoagland is a poet of a ragged, half-satirical, half-lyrical intensity. If Billy Collins is Updike, Hoagland is Salinger, or perhaps Holden Caulfield ...making us think we know the ground we are on, then showing us that we don't...For me, he not only pulls the rug from under my feet when it comes to the moral complacencies and platitudes that I don't notice I live by, he does the same with my given poetic certainties' - henry shukman, Poetry London '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...What Narcissism Means to Me shows us our age and how great poetry is still possible' - rodney jones 'A Late Night Show of poetry hosted by a high priest of irony (check out the title)...These poems are very funny, but they are also sad, sharp-edged and ambitious... confiding, consistently irreverent and, in a way, comforting' - carol muske-dukes, Los Angeles Times '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"...there is something refreshing about his willingness to expose his crummier impulses' - emily nussbaum, New York Times

Tony Hoagland's zany poems poke and provoke at the same time as they entertain and delight. He is American poetry's hilarious 'high priest of irony', a wisecracker and a risktaker whose disarming humour, self-scathing and tenderness are all fuelled by an aggressive moral intelligence. He pushes the poem not just to its limits but over the edge.