Green Squall

Jay Hopler'sGreen Squallis the winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. As Louise Gluck observes in her foreword, "Green Squallbegins and ends in the garden"; however, Hopler's gardens are not of the seasonal variety evoked by poets of the English lyrichis gardens flourish at lower, fiercer latitudes and in altogether different mindscapes. There is a darkness in Hopler's work as deep and brutal as any in American poetry. Though his verbal extravagance and formal invention bring to mind Wallace Stevens's tropical extrapolations, there lies beneathGreen Squall'slush tropical surfaces a terrifying world in which nightmare and celebration are indistinguishable, and hope is synonymous with despair.

Jay Hopler was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1970 and has earned degrees from New York University, The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He lives in Southwest Florida.