Hospice Plastics

“This book absolutely hums and it’s so powerful, every line of it, and the way [Hinton] uses language astounds and amazes me.”
— Emma Bolden

“The poems in Hospice Plastics perform a kind of open-heart surgery on themselves. One ‘transcribes a muscle to make sure of it,’ or ‘clamps open a muscle to make sure of it.’ The poem is an instrument we use to explore the un-understandable. Mortal wounds teach us what matters…These are lucid, stubborn, ingenious, beautiful poems.”
— Jennifer Clarvoe

“Rachel Hinton’s extraordinary Hospice Plastics is the deepest exploration and dive; it presents as a life-long cold-plunge into the mix of death and things. What could be more material than grief?…Hinton explores with astonishing skill and vision, her immense capacity for genuine engagement with boundaries: line, image, picture, sentence, grammar, body, and memory. Hospice Plastics’ poetics is exceptional; what is the form of loss in form?”
— Colette LaBouff

“In this unabashedly candid and gorgeously intimate debut, Rachel Hinton‘s lyric choreography is thrillingly unpredictable at every turn. The poems of Hospice Plastics are bracing, funny, heartbreaking, always accountable to something beyond autobiographical memory, alert to their assembled materials. This is that rare collection that I’ve not been able to stop re-reading; in it I hear the sound of a consciousness making a language by which to un-hypnotize itself from commonplace assumptions. ‘When will I feel like I have been slapped with kisses?’ asks Hinton. I answer, whenever I read these poems.”
— Mary Szybist