Joe Hess is from Columbus, Ohio and received his MA from Miami University and MFA from Ashland University. You can find his work in The Ekphrastic Review, Into the Void, Lime Hawk, Postcard Poems and Prose, Helen Literary Magazine, Fourth and Sycamore, and a 2017 anthology from Shabda Press entitled Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands. His chapbook, Trauma Décor, was released in January 2022.
PRAISE:
In Hess’s Into the Ancient, a book that leaps centuries, landscapes, and modes of telling, the poet draws our attention most vividly to our essential loneliness. The ongoing historical traumas—personal and public—that inform these cinematic poems are rendered without sentiment. They do not comfort but speak their truth.
–Kathy Fagan, Kingsley Tufts finalist and author of Bad Hobby
Sharp, self-lacerating, and elegant, Into the Ancient crosses several continents while digging into memories: ex-lovers, a tragically lost brother. In Joe Hess’s exacting mirror, a troubling American style of loving, fogged-over and obscure against a late Cold War backdrop, starts to come clear.
–Cathy Wagner, author of Of Course. New York: Fence Books, 2020, Nervous Device. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2012, My New Job. New York: Fence Books, 2009, Macular Hole. New York: Fence Books, 2004, and Miss America. New York: Fence Books, 2001.
AWARDS:
WINNER: Alumni Book Award from the Master of Fine Arts Program at Ashland University. The judge, poet George David Clark, had the following to say about the poetry collection, Into the Ancient:
“Hess has a great talent for imagery, and poem by poem the details in this collection are as psychologically insightful as they are vivid and precise.Into the Ancient simply sees the world well—nothing could be less simple. Many of these poems reflect on the past, but it’s the past that transcends our calendars and continues living today in the mystery of the human heart. These poems attend to that mystery with the care to humbly honor it and the boldness to look it right in face.”
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