The Devotional Poems

The Devotional Poems (Black Ocean Press, 2013)

“The world is constantly being ripped limb from limb in these poems, teeming as we are with beasts and bees and phantoms and hermaphrodites and dudes. Devoted, yes, to terror, but true too to the gorgeous black underbelly of how we’re all at once somehow together possessed. Joe Hall breeds electricity to breathe by again and again. He eats and regurgitates an unblinking, brilliant, sacred eye.”
—Blake Butler

“This is a book with a basic religion, which shifts and turns its shade upon looking, drawing its colors from The Book of Revelation as much as from the kinder spirit books. It is a sacred text where Hall becomes the ‘singing corpse,’ not ‘dragged across this landscape,’ but instead the singing thing dancing across the hills and valley.”
—Dorothea Lasky

“Hall’s devotions uncover ‘in the derelict warehouse’s silence’ a worldly utopia grown fat on the carcasses of lifeless heavens: ‘This is where I stick my head in the liquid / fire of the sun and piss myself while / burning vistas multiply.’”
—J. Michael Martinez

 

Post Nativity (Publishing Genius, 2012) – A chapbook

Catalog Copy: “It struck me as a cavalcade at the time, a declarative poem along the lines of Ginsberg’s Howl. It has a bit of the sacred, a little of the consumer wasteland, a touch of terrorism. Stunned, it marvels.” –Adam Robinson

The Container Store (Vols I & II) by Joe Hall and Chad Hardy (Spring Gun Press, 2012)

Catalog Copy: A mash up of high art and the profane, a typographical assault. The book itself is an enactment of the very spectacle that it reveals.

Pigafetta Is My Wife (Black Ocean, 2010)

Catalog Copy:

Pigafetta Is My Wife enters the crisis that is the love between the colonizer and the colonized. These poems fragment the journals of Antonio Pigafetta, a 16th Century traveler who recorded Magellan’s hellish circumnavigation of the globe, while tracking a present-day speaker and his beloved as they are distanced and reunited across the map. Along the way we visit historical moments including a botched circumcision as performance art, the Rape of Nanking, and 17th century missionaries in the Philippines. Through this intertwining of narratives the book reveals how the past and present are visceral beasts caught in a cycle of passion and destruction. Like an epic murder ballad, Hall moves from collage to epistle, suffering to ecstasy, while pinpointing what is at stake in the pursuit of love and the dismantling of the self.

Praise for Pigafetta Is My Wife:

“A genuinely fine work, moving beautifully between Magellan’s voyage—the ethics therein, with language informed by discovery literature—and a series of epistles, taking the notion of circumnavigation to an unforeseeable confessional level. I like the work very much—that making necessary of history—and see it as one of lyric poetry’s responsibilities. The epilogues, too, are beautiful.”

—Dan Beachy-Quick

“Almost impossibly grand in scope Pigafetta Is My Wife is a rare achievement and quite a debut. Hall’s poetry crosses contemporary love and ancient epic, folding inward and out by motion derivative of the sestina and pantoum, so that whether via image or address, beautiful shards fall: ‘A chrysanthemum blossom sails across a bowl of milk.’ Emotion accretes in accordance with ambition. A treatise on the action of discovery, this is a book to be taken in whole.”

—Sally Keith