James Hoch's poems have appeared in Slate, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Black Warrior, Gettysburg, Five Fingers, and other magazines. His first book, A Parade of Hands, won the Gerald Cable Book Award, and he was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Hoch teaches at Ramapo College and splits his time between New Jersey and Seattle, Washington.

Other poems by James Hoch in Verse Daily:
June 23, 2006:   "All Things End in Fragrance" and "Starlings" " Out the window, starlings..."
September 30, 2002:  "Furnace" "....We did not believe // it could speak..."

Books by James Hoch: A Parade of Hands, Miscreants

Other poems on the web by James Hoch:
"Night Crabbing"
Four poems
"sound of body falling off a bridge"
"The Farm in Coleraine"
"Late Autumn Wasp"

James Hoch's Home Page.

About Miscreants:

"James Hoch's vivid, disturbing, and distinctively American ballads and lyrics demonstrate that `anger is energy.' And yet, the anger that generates these remarkable poems is always searching for `what's left to praise.' At the heart of Miscreants, Hoch's astonishing second book, is a dark and rueful optimism that leads us deftly through the most difficult and harrowing of our personal and collective experiences."
—Michael Collier

"A wonderful, fresh, and striking collection. . . .This is the opposite of elegy. "This is place as origin and torment and speculation—wasting lives as much as shaping them."
—Eavan Boland

"In elegiac lyrics that are smart, tough, and delicately calibrated to register all sides of a paradox, James Hoch has written a book of moral imagination in which there are no certainties, no easy affirmations, no ultimate place of witness or of judgment. This is a book of memorable speech, in which the syntax is passionate, as Yeats said it should be, and the music touched with what Keats called a 'fine excess.' With honesty, nuance, and dignified candor, these poems measure the distance between what we ought to feel and what we do feel."
—Tom Sleigh

"Miscreants looks within the interiority of our everyday lives with objective, unvarnished detail that always arrives at emotional resonance. . . .Hoch's work is particularly important: it's in the voice of a male who is not afraid of expressing male vulnerability."
—A. Van Jordan