Hello I Must Be Going: Poems

by David Hernandez

Overview

Hello I Must Be Going, David Hernandez’s fifth collection of poems, offers a unique take on poetry informed by works of art, in particular the work of artist Ed Ruscha. With narrative and lyrical brushstrokes, Hernandez crafts vibrant landscapes that depict the chaos of the modern world and the beauty entwined within it. Hello I Must Be Going pulses with originality. This is a book of our time, and of time itself—of unrest, loss, grief, and “this endless parade / shimmering toward silence.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822988809
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	03/22/2022
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	94
File size:	643 KB

About the Author

David Hernandez is the author of Dear, Sincerely; Hoodwinked, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry; Always Danger, winner of the Crab Orchard Series Award; and A House Waiting for Music. He has been awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes. His poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and The Best American Poetry. He is also the author of two YA novels, No More Us for You and Suckerpunch, both published by HarperCollins. David teaches creative writing at California State University, Long Beach and is married to writer Lisa Glatt.

Table of Contents

Contents I. Shoutout to Ed Ruscha Hello I Must Be Going We’re This and We’re That, Aren’t We? Depths of Despair Hurry Up Schedule It’s Only Vanishing Cream Woman on Fire S.S. Nevertheless Decibel House History Kids These Are Brave Days Thinking the Same Falling but Frozen Historical Dust A Life that Doubles-Back on Itself Water Soluble Dreams Those of Us Who Have Double Parked Varieties of Internal Torment Hello I Must Be Going Uncertain Frontier Century Sickness Made in California II. The Silent Docent Landscape with Pink Tulips Distorted by Dread Landscape with Active Shooter Cutting through a National Park Landscape with Frisbee and Dam Breaking Landscape with American Sycamore and the Severed Heads of Bees Landscape with Blurred Figures Running toward the Vanishing Point Landscape with Pumpjacks Overtaken by Vines Landscape with Protesters on One Side, Police on the Other, a Pasture in Between Landscape with Abandoned Picnic and Flames Landscape with Doctor Taking a Breather Landscape with Cheetah Going Seventy in the Serengeti Still Life (2020) III. Beside Our Breaths Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Bones Ai Weiwei’s Middle Finger Marina Abramović’s Gaze Meditation on Impermanence Notes Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

05/23/2022

The intriguing fifth collection from Hernandez (Dear, Sincerely) uses visual art as a foil for the unique possibilities of language. The poems in the first section take their titles from paintings by Ed Ruscha, whose work often placed words over color fields. The poems build scenes without describing the paintings directly, as in “S.S. Nevertheless”: “He is almost// a brook when he wanders around the yard, practically a river.” In the second section, each title begins “Landscape with...” but seems to reference no preexisting work by Ruscha or otherwise. Hernandez mobilizes visual art’s vocabulary: the sun sears “a bright white hole// through the canvas,” but there is “No museum guard or docent to tell/ what it all means”; “You look closely,/ closer still—until/ a museum guard clears his throat.” In the third section, other artists are invoked, bringing maker, art, and viewer together: “Praise the dead for bestowing us these, our waves./ Downstream, we’ll do the same.” Readers will appreciate the specific, thoughtful attention these poems generate about depression, government violence, and parental aging, as well as the inventive investigations of visual art motifs. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Readers will appreciate the specific, thoughtful attention these poems generate about depression, government violence, and parental aging, as well as the inventive investigations of visual art motifs.” —Publishers Weekly

“Hernandez demonstrates how some art helps us bear the world while also making us face its full menace and brutality. For Hernandez’s poem-gallery is frightening—full of death, sick loved ones, and dire social problems such as climate change, active shooters, and Trump’s abuse of migrant children. The book asks us to pay anguished attention to these threats and disasters, but offers art, and the ways we attend to art, as an intermediary between us and brute reality.” —Harvard Review Online
 

“I’ve read David Hernandez for twenty years, but only with this terrific new book am I realizing he is one of our generation’s leading California poets. Whether philosophical, playful, or political, his language is guided by generosity and wonder. He explores the shifting landscapes and shifting cultural grounds underfoot. Beneath his laid-back West Coast charm, he lays bare the intensities of modern life. Hello I Must Be Going is a book of irreducible wisdom and witness.” —Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

“Between the hello and the going lies the shadow—and the poem. In this compelling new collection, David Hernandez writes poems that tumble forward so intensely they rattle our teeth, and others that are nearly frozen in anticipatory grief. This collection offers up the choices we contend with in an era of ‘obliterating despair.’ Fret or sleepwalk, or take the world in through the senses, taste the fruit, ‘despite.’” —Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

From the Publisher