“Sandra Hoben’s lyrical narrative poems are not tidy packages of words tied in neat bows. They stand in the tradition of Keats’s negative capability or Whitman’s “contradictory” statements in lines of poems like “The Letter C” that begin “I want to write words that start / with the letter C: / camaraderie, good company, / compatibility, consideration, / as well as compassion, / and, of course, some comedy. / And respect. Which I know / doesn’t start with the letter C...” or like “Parallel Lines” in which she states “Parallel lines never meet / .........../ But parallel lines meet at infinity...”. Hoben further states that “we will never understand what we already know.” We already know these poems. We just don’t know that we know them, until we read them. And then after we do, we don’t know how we ever did without them!”
—Terry Lucas
