dear donald…

NoRoutine Books, 2021

artist book, printed in an edition of 99.

dear donald… collects a year of daily poem-drawings produced from January 21st 2017-January 21 2018. A piece a day, every day, for 365 days, all for Donald. Each begins with an epistolary “dear donald...” and reckons with language, power, and the abuse, misuse, and corruption of words during the first year of the Trump administration. Part linguistic outcry, part poetic exploration, the works exist here in the form of a tear-off calendar. The NoRoutine publication also includes a second book of “spells” created in response to the drawings by a group of artists, writers, composers and musicians including Angélica Negrón, Laura Sims, Missy Mazzoli, Gabriela Lena Frank, Krista Caballero, Xinan Helen Ran and others.

A number of the drawings were first published in Hyperallergic with an accompanying series of essays

available through NoRoutine

Forget Reading

Shearsman Books, 2008

Purchase through: Amazon, SPD

second full-length collection of poetry

"As in The Concerto Form, Forget Reading testifies to Anthony Hawley’s perfect vocalic pitch, the ability few poets have to find precisely the right 'note' — whether syllable, word, or echoing phrase — to give his densely woven and arresting imagery a true electric charge. ‘Shampoo too,' reads one of the ‘P(r)etty Sonnets,' "measures how clean the sentence is." Yes, and who else could get so much mileage ("specimen rays") from rhyming "maybe" with "garbage'? These are lyrics, not to read but to reread—and with the intensest pleasure."

—Marjorie Perloff

"The glibly ironic voice of these poems admonishes us to “forget reading,” forget poetry, forget anything less appealing to the (American) public than more and more news of Anna Nicole Smith’s death. “Poem can’t parade and no one holds it / up to the light or usually for too long,” it says, confirming poetry’s supposed inconsequentiality. But the poems speak up despite themselves, and in doing so they affirm poetry’s slight, subterranean power inside a culture of overwhelming and decadent ugliness, one made up of “the negligent droves” who inhabit a “never ending western.” Inside the beast itself, “a poem…/ does a thing, does a jig and slides / a circus of information / out the body.” Due to the very odds stacked against them, these beautifully moving poems enact a radical little protest, unheeded by the majority rule, yes, but also utterly unchecked.” 

— Laura Sims

reviews:

by Mathias Svalina, Cutbank, 2008

by Eileen Tabios, Galatea Resurrects, 2008 

The Concerto Form

Shearman Books, 2006

Purchase from Amazon , SPD Books

"The poems in The Concerto Form are made of close harmonies and intimate elisions as taut as the strings of a violin; their muted, contracted sonorities seem to vibrate with a desire to find solace in the grammar of perception. If it is true that the world and its landscapes are "already written a thousand times over by our gaze" then Anthony Hawley reforms both gaze and landscape into an indelible music." 

--Ann Lauterbach

"With The Concerto Form, Anthony Hawley joins that international company of exploratory poets who celebrate at once the fugitive music and the mysteries of the tangible world. With great formal range, he addresses the here/not here, the vibrating strings of things as they are. "All in the eye's reach," as he declares. And the ear's." 

--Michael Palmer

Reviews:

by Andrew Rippeon, Jacket, 2008

Autobiography/Oughtabiography

Counterpath Press, 2008

Purchases from

Amazon, SPD Books

Through two series of poems, AUTOBIOGRAPHY/OUGHTABIOGRAPHY explores tensions between memory, erasure, writing and the self. The title sequence tracks a speaking voice as it works through shards of its past, questioning and, at times, undermining the autobiographical act, at once battling and perpetuating its own disappearance. With the second series, "Apple Silence," the already unstable speaking self becomes increasingly fragmented, deformed.