We’re excited to offer an exclusive cover reveal of Erin Hoover’s third poetry collection, Consent (Black Lawrence Press, May 11, 2027).
On an otherwise ordinary morning, a woman is taking her child to school when her former partner attacks her. In Consent, Hoover traces the events leading up to and following that incident through narrative poems that explore the day-to-day realities of coercive control and the one-step-forward, two-steps-back journey of healing from intimate partner violence.
Urgent and keenly self-aware, these poems yield startling revelations about the volatile nature of traumatic memory. Hoover collages texts drawn from the rhetoric of dominant/submissive BDSM protocols, pamphlets on abuse from shelters, survivor testimonies, annotations of her own writings from within her relationship, and interviews recorded in recovery, producing a defiantly non-linear survivor narrative shaped by documentary poetics. Consent lays bare the expectations imposed on partners and children subjected to domestic violence in a culture that produces and protects abuse, ultimately rejecting the abuser’s manipulations in favor of the body’s own undeniable truth.
Erin Hoover is also the author of two previous poetry collections, Barnburner and No Spare People. Originally from Pennsylvania, Hoover lives in Cookeville, Tennessee, and teaches creative writing and literary editing as an associate professor of English at Tennessee Tech University. She curates and hosts the in-person poetry reading series Sawmill Poetry, produces the “Not Abandon, But Abide” interview series for Southern Review of Books, and serves as the inaugural Poet Laureate of Cookeville, Tennessee, through December 31, 2027. She spoke here about how this new collection relates to themes she is drawn to in all her work and yet moves ahead into a daring and vulnerable direction:
“I never expected to write a book like Consent or to have to reckon with the personal history that inspired it, yet my poems have always been concerned with agency and control, especially for women. Barnburner comes from the rural place I grew up and has been praised as a powerful, modern coming-of-age story about what womanhood looks like for some in America, including the many kinds of violence that can shape that experience. No Spare People grapples with gendered forms of power in the American South, refusing contradictory ideals of motherhood even as it celebrates my own tiny mother-daughter family. Consent may at first glance appear to be about a power relationship between two people that turns abusive, but readers will notice that his abuse quite literally moves outside the home: first to the parking lot outside the apartment, and then to the courts. In fact, versions of this story are everywhere, if you care to look. I’ve long been interested in the way cultural narratives—about, for instance, class and motherhood—distort individual experience. This collection is specifically interested in finding truth in fragmentation, recursiveness, and nonlinearity, and in affirming that truth.”
The artwork for the cover is from a painting created by artist Audrey Ryan. Here’s how Ryan describes this piece:
“‘In Dreams‘ was painted circa 2014 for a show called Black Hole. It is primarily about my relationship with girlhood, dysfunction, addiction, disorder, trauma, desire, and friendship. Also, cuteness.”
Erin Hoover, who also collaborated with designer Zoe Norvell to bring the cover to life, spoke about the design process and the cover’s significance to her new collection:
“I have loved Audrey Ryan’s work since we were both fellows at Vermont Studio Center years ago. For me, ‘In Dreams’ evokes the tender psychological negotiations behind a BDSM scene, while its two female figures–the one further split to hold the eye of the standing figure–embody the duality, or fracturing, of self at the heart of poems about consent and its revocation in an abusive relationship. Norvell’s design foregrounds the painting itself and allows it to do this rhetorical and symbolic work. The font used for the title and for my name has a simple brush-stroke quality that suggests the contractual nature of power dynamics.”
Consent will be released on May 11, 2027, and preorders are open now.
POETRY
Consent
By Erin Hoover
Black Lawrence Press
Forthcoming May 11, 2027
