Join SoLit for an afternoon with poet Erin Hoover! She will share from her recent poetry collection, No Spare People. 

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About the Author: 

Erin Hoover was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She is the author of two poetry collections: Barnburner (Elixir, 2018), which won the Antivenom Poetry Award and a Florida Book Award, and No Spare People (Black Lawrence, 2023). Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry and in journals such as Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and The Sun. Hoover lives in Tennessee and teaches creative writing at Tennessee Tech University. She curates and hosts a poetry reading series, Sawmill Poetry, and produces the “Not Abandon, but Abide” monthly interview series for the Southern Review of Books. Visit her website at erinhooverpoet.com.

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About No Spare People:
No Spare People documents the 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 a possibility? 

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"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. ... Having long played by rules so detrimental to her selfhood, the speaker of these poems shares her unvarnished truth: 'I want to be able to talk to people / without have to f— or be f—ed, yeah?' Hell, yeah."
—Cate Marvin

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"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

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"No one is spared the difficulties, pains, or joys of existence, as Hoover brilliantly demonstrates throughout this book... The power and beauty of this remarkable, poignant, and skillfully crafted and curated collection should be experienced in full."
—Gregory Luce for Scene 4​

— Gregory Luce for Scene 4