Description
CONTINUED CASES is a collection of poems satirical, social, and political. A sequel to Hague’s Public Hearings (Word Press, 2009) it was written partly in response to the 45th presidency of the United States. It addresses practices, policies, and personalities as well as opines on education, the arts, and the fate of the environment. One of the book’s epigraphs is from the 2017 prayer card at the funeral of Wayne Barret, author of Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention. “Our credo must be the exposure of the plunderers, the steerers, the wirepullers, the bosses, the brokers, the campaign givers and takers … So I say: Stew, percolate, pester, track, burrow, besiege, confront, damage, level, care.” In CONTINUED CASES, Hague does his best to offer opposition to the outlandish, the illegal, the inhumane. At the same time, as a native Appalachian from the Ohio Valley steel town declared in the 1970s to have the worst air in the country, he recollects the personal damages of industrial extractive industry. Aware of the agrarian traditions of Jefferson, the democratic, populist appetites of Whitman, and the counter-cultural politics of the Sixties, Hague offers seasoned witness to our times.
Poetry.
“Richard Hague’s fearless new collection, CONTINUED CASES, is a testimony to due diligence, no holds barred. Hague is a scholar, an archivist, a revealer of falsehoods, an instigator if you will, a soothsayer poet who is not afraid to use his gift for words as activism: '2,000 new chemicals / every year, vast spills; / of oil, billions of / fracking gallons poisoned and / lost to the water cycle.' Plain speak from a man who comes from 'noisy town, railroads, steel mills—cacophonies and cinders.' In this time of chaos, troglodytes, and naysayers, Hague is a man determined to use his passions to bring back some sense of duty, compassion, and honor to our fractured yet precious and beautiful world.”
—Kari Gunter-Seymour, Ohio Poet Laureate, author of Alone in the House of My Heart
“In his latest collection, CONTINUED CASES, Dick Hague is unflinching in his acute and poignant poetic commentary on Americans and American society, thus providing an apt sequel to Public Hearings (Word Press, 2009). Drawing from vast lived experiences, as well as shrewd societal observations and lamentations, Hague offers his own State of the Union report in which he bemoans human stupidity and apathy, indicts inanity, and issues a call to immediate action. Indeed, as readers of Hague’s work, we are called out. We are called out to pay attention to and heal our struggling planet, to counter nefarious 'alternative facts,' to live lives centered on justice and peace. Without hyperbole, Hague’s poetry proclaims, whether overtly or subtly, that future generations depend on us to do so. Now.”
—Theresa Burris, Assistant VP of Community Engagement and Economic Development, Emory & Henry College
Author Bio
Richard Hague, a native of Steubenville, Ohio in the Appalachian Ohio River Valley, taught at Purcell Marian High School in Cincinnati for 45 years. While there he engaged in other enterprises and adventures, including adjuncting at Edgecliff College and at Xavier University, his alma mater, commercial urban gardening, hosting writers workshops, and teaching for a few summers at the Institute for Professional Development and Graduate School of Education at Northeastern University in Boston. His high school career ended when he refused to sign an anti-gay and anti-worker's rights Archdiocese of Cincinnati contract in May 2014. Not long after, he was named Writer-in- Residence at Thomas More University in northern Kentucky, where he continued as Artist-in-Residence until 2022. He now teaches and writes with The Originary Arts Initiative. He is author, co-editor, or editor of 20 collections, most recently RIPARIAN: POETRY, SHORT PROSE AND PHOTOGRAPHY INSPIRED BY THE OHIO RIVER (Dos Madres Press, 2019), Earnest Occupations: Teaching, Writing, Gardening & Other Local Work (Bottom Dog Press, 2018), STUDIED DAYS: POEMS EARLY & LATE IN APPALACHIA (Dos Madres Press, 2017), WHERE DRUNK MEN GO: A LONG POEM (Dos Madres Press, 2015) and DURING THE RECENT EXTINCTIONS: NEW & SELECTED POEMS 1984-2012 (Dos Madres Press, 2012), for which he was given the Weatherford Award in Poetry Writing Award. He continues to live in Cincinnati.
Author City: CINCINNATI, OH USA