Overview

The Hoarder is a series of prose poems, telling the story of a sixteen-year-old boy's attempt to sift through the fallout of an older woman's hoarding issues over the course of one summer. It is told from the perspective of the boy, Ben Godfrey, as well as the older woman, Maggie Harper. Ben lives in a college town and has been hired to help clean out Maggie's house and barn. While rifling through this mess, he is also grappling with the fact that he is falling in love with his best friend and trying to navigate through the teenage world of hormones, hard work, and uncertainty. Maggie's house and property, meanwhile, have been deteriorating just as her life has been crumbling around her. When he was just sixteen himself, Sammy, Maggie's son, committed suicide. As a result, her marriage with her husband, Walter, falls apart, and Maggie is left alone to collect memories, heartache, and, most of all, junk. Maggie and Ben learn a lot from their shared experience, and though nothing can really change a person or a place, they find some peace and solace in each other, as questions to some of life's biggest mysteries begin to come into focus.

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Reviews

Adroit at constructing a narrative arc, Chace expertly employs stunning acrobatic lyricism in line after line of these prose poems set in summer, and they often feel like scenes from a movie on a drive-in screen in July. While the collection carries the weight of unfathomable loss, the veil of depression, and the heartache of unrequited love, its words lilt, lift, and leap-sometimes swiftly, sometimes slowly-""as the light emptied from the sky like a flat tire,"" and in the end, leave the reader with hope to ""begin again."" -Dawn Leas author of I Know When to Keep Quiet, Take Something When You Go, A Person Worth Knowing, and The Sin of Being Okay

Author Information

Logan Chace earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Hollins University, and he currently teaches English and Creative Writing to high school students at Wyoming Seminary in Kingston, Pennsylvania. His debut full-length collection of poems, After a Night of Drowning, was published by Kelsay Books in 2022. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

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