joys and perils of a tiny mother-daughter family navigating life on the margins. From poems about finding autonomy as a queer, unpartnered parent by choice in the South to those chronicling a generation's economic instability, Hoover rejects so-called " acceptable losses" stemming from inequalities of gender, race, and class. The book asks, what happens to the woman no longer willing to live a lie? How does language invent not only identity, but possibility?
" Erin Hoover's second collection, No Spare People, recalls to me the sobering effect of encountering Adrienne Rich's work in the late ' 80s. These poems deal in reality, eschewing the fantastic ... This is a deeply intellectual and expertly wrought collection." -- Cate Marvin
" These are hard poems in that they press far past the facile reductive binaries of good and evil, savior and saved, and into something-- a lyric, a voice-- that feels a little more complicated, a little more like our own world." -- Kaveh Akbar