Hosts and Guests - (Princeton Contemporary Poets) by Nate Klug (Paperback)

About the Book

"This collection is one of two manuscripts recently selected by Susan Stewart for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, which is dedicated to publishing the best work of today's emerging and established poets. We publish one to two titles per year at the sole discretion of the series editor. The series began in 1975 with the publication of Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky, and has published landmark collections by such poets as Ann Lauterbach and Jorie Graham. Hosts and Guests is Nate Klug's second full-length book of poems, and the first with Princeton. Taking the double meaning of hospes as both "guest" and "host" as its central theme, this volume focuses on questions of different perspectives. The title poem, for instance, depicts a set of parents visiting a newlywed couple, and explores how the guest/host relation shapes and transforms their perspectives of one another. The volume also explores other guest/host connections, such as recognition and misrecognition, greeting, and farewell. Klug's poems reflect on what it means to view the domestic and familiar through the lens of strangeness and estrangement"--]cProvided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

An exciting new collection from a poet whose debut was praised by Colorado Review as "a seduction by way of small astonishments"

Nate Klug has been hailed by the Threepenny Review as a poet who is "an original in Eliot's sense of the word." In Hosts and Guests, his exciting second collection, Klug revels in slippery roles and shifting environments. The poems move from a San Francisco tech bar and a band of Pokémon Go players to the Shakers and St. Augustine, as they explore the push-pull between community and solitude, and past and present. Hosts and Guests gathers an impressive range: critiques of the "immiserated quiet" of modern life, love poems and poems of new fatherhood, and studies of a restless, nimble faith. At a time when the meanings of hospitality and estrangement have assumed a new urgency, Klug takes up these themes in chiseled, musical lines that blend close observation of the natural world, social commentary, and spiritual questioning. As Booklist has observed of his work, "The visual is rendered sonically, so perfectly one wants to involve the rest of the senses, to speak the lines, to taste the syllables."

Review Quotes

"Intelligent, wry, learned, and at times witty . . . Klug bears witness to the fruitful cross-pollinations of contemporary poetry and contemporary religious faith...he is worth watching. - Library Journal"

"Klug is a poet of attention for whom metre is a slow-mo technology that lets you notice what's in front of you. But he also finds words for interiority, helping you notice emotions that get lost in the rush of the everyday. - James K.A. Smith, Image Journal newsletter"

"Klug is writing some of the strongest poetry you can find in American letters these days. Stoically fierce and vividly alert. The signature surfaces of a Nate Klug poem . . . are often somehow simultaneously beautifully smooth and a little edgy. But they are also chiseled and efficient, and these qualities together are a sign of the richness in the depths they signify."---Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's

"Klug, at his best, can marry image, movement, and melody into precise order... I find myself...so refreshed by the poems of Hosts and Guests. - Christian Detisch, 32poems.com"

"Nate Klug's Hosts and Guests examines the sometimes uneasy, shifting economies between what serves as host and what is hosted in an array of contexts, from the Anthropocene to mother and fetus. . . . But it is perhaps in his delicate, intricate syntactical suspensions and arrangements, as much as in his arresting image systems, that Klug conveys the beautiful struggle of risking love and belief in bodies seemingly made to be lost to us."---Lisa Russ Spaar, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Quirky and philosophical. . . . the poems in Hosts and Guests are . . . both exploratory and concise; they wander without filler or clutter. Klug's descriptions are sharp, subtle, perceptive. . . . Here is the startling opposite of dogma's violence: a free thinker who keeps running into God despite his disavowals."---Caroline Pittman, Threepenny Review

About the Author

Nate Klug is the author of the poetry collection Anyone and Rude Woods, a modern translation of Virgil's Eclogues. His poetry has appeared in the Nation, the New York Review of Books, and The Best American Poetry. A Congregational minister, he lives in Albany, California.