Consent

Erin Hoover’s Consent fearlessly takes us to the core of a trauma that rewrites the body. Bold and bare, these poems engage in excavation of abuse through the body’s testimony, but also through podcast transcripts, erasures of police reports, and domestic violence brochures turned into villanelles. Arranging and rearranging these texts, Hoover continually responds to the opening epigraph: “to know who we are we must know what was real.” The poems keep asking what did each moment test? What will come next? Even when the court finds the truth credible, how will a person learn safety again? Hoover opens the body’s story and lets the light touch it.

—Traci Brimhall, author of Love Prodigal

In the United States, over a third of women will experience domestic violence, sexual violence, or stalking in their lifetime, and yet their stories are too often missing from our bookshelves. Erin Hoover, in her stunning collection of poetry, Consent, fills this lack with an astonishing examination of her own story, intermingled with that of others. Every poem here relentlessly exposes the difficulties, hypocrisies, and complexities of survival. Using an inventive array of poetic forms and styles, Hoover refuses to look away, and, in that refusal, has written a book as poignant for its beauty and energy as for its unmasking of violences too often hidden. We often throw around words like “necessary” and “urgent” in blurbs but, in a world where the most dangerous place for a woman is in her own home, Consent is an essential read.

—Lynn Melnick, author of Refusenik

Drawing on court documents, police reports, interview transcripts, podcast recordings, historical archives, and personal testimony, Erin Hoover’s Consent pushes beyond the boundaries of poetic imagination into something larger: a documentary record of coercive control and its aftermath. However, Consent is not merely a record of harm. No, not at all. These are poems concerned with the body and its governance, with inheritance and repetition, with exploring how trauma reproduces itself and how it might finally be interrupted. “What is possible?” the speakers ask, directly and urgently and more than once. What is possible in this current political landscape that has prioritized making women’s experiences illegible to the point of obliteration? Despite this atmosphere of surveillance and control, the collection insists upon the possibility of a self, recovered from the patriarchal narratives imposed upon it, whole and undeniable: “nothing fondled or smudged or malformed.” And while the collection returns to the seeming inevitability of violence against women, this gesture is not to accept it, but to challenge its authority, and by extension, the systems that give it permission. In the end, Consent arrives at what remains after violence, after testimony, after the various archives have spoken. A voice emerges, both devastating and liberating: “I don’t belong to this […]. I never did.”

—Iliana Rocha, author of The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez