“These funny, sensitive, and wonderfully weird poems/images/complications weave the familial with the surreal, the airy with the erudite, the nest with the house. Settle in. Don’t worry. Start flying. Welcome home.”

“In this place of tenderness and threat, Hoks’s speaker attempts to take up a fatherhood outside patriarchy, to repurpose the human eye and brain for something other than a gunsight or surveillance device. With the absurdity and purpose of Lear, Yeats, and Clare, he attempts to take the crow’s eye view, without hurting anyone, without taking anything from anyone.”

“His fine gradations of observation (‘exciting yet strange’) turn the reader into a barometer of strong subtleties like those of the weather, that can be minute even as they affect us powerfully. These poems are like great gulps of fresh air.”

“With courtly delicacy and humility belied by subtly extreme declarations and refreshingly diverse means, Hoks’s poems can be one moment deceptively plain-spoken, the next broadcasting from a typhoon.”