Chris Hosea

Poet Chris Hosea in 2023.

Chris Hosea (born 1973) is an American poet, artist, curator, essayist, critic, teacher, and communications professional.

Hosea earned his AB in English from Harvard College (Class of 1994, grad. 1998). While Hosea was an undergraduate, Professors Helen Vendler, Henri Cole, and Nicholas Jenkins awarded him the Academy of American Poets 1998 Harvard College Prize, for a long poem subsequently published in the Academy of American Poets anthology New Voices, edited by Heather McHugh.

Hosea graduated, in 2006, with a MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA Program for Poets & Writers, where he studied with James Tate, Peter Gizzi, and Dara Barrois/Dixon, as well as classmates and others.

Pulitzer Prize winning poet John Ashbery selected Hosea's first poetry collection, Put Your Hands In, for the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.

Ashbery, in his judge's citation for the Whitman Award, compared Hosea's work to that of Marcel Duchamp, and wrote that Hosea's poetry

somehow subsumes derision and erotic energy and comes out on top. Maybe that's because 'poetry is the cruelest month,' as he says, correcting T. S. Eliot. Transfixed in mid-paroxysm, the poems also remind us of Samuel Beckett’s line (in Watt (novel)): 'The pain not yet pleasure, the pleasure not yet pain.' One feels plunged in a wave of happening that is about to crest.

Anne Waldman, in presenting Hosea with the Whitman prize during the 2013 Academy of American Poets Awards Ceremony, held at New York University's Tishman Hall, said, "We express gratitude [to John Ashbery] for this exemplary choice." Waldman went on to state that "[Hosea'] poetry is vibrant, quick witted[.] His poetry carries a refreshing, unpretentious sexual candor, making startling 'now you see it, now you don't' moves, like an illusionist, and is contemporary without being facile. He inculcates the restless quotidian in a swirl of modal energy[.] I felt the restless, surreal pulse of this new poet."

Put Your Hands In

Reviewers of Put Your Hands In have highlighted the book's emphasis on contradiction, the absurd, and sound, comparing it to the work of Language poets.

Poet and critic Stu Watson described Hosea's poetry as "not a confession but a revelation," calling it the product of "an impossibly refined imaginative vision, a vision that, remarkably open to interpretation, manages to reveal almost nothing about its creator, the poet beyond the page, while disclosing volumes about the contemporary reality in which that poet lives."

Cristina M Rau critiqued the book's "distracting...references to hyper-contemporary technology that simply does not seem to fit: iPhones, Facebook, Uggs, Instagram," but added that "The pieces confuse and delight and reveal in a mostly successful way."

Publishers Weekly found that Put Your Hands In "juggles sexualized imagery, contemporary and historical pop cultural references, and an inventive approach to language that is as relentlessly provocative as it is approachable." Library Journal described Hosea's poetry as an "energized, tumbling mass of tight-stitched imagery" that "presents a sort of nutty roadshow of American culture."

Poet, playwright, and artist Ariana Reines performed as a special guest during the Put Your Hands In New York book launch, hosted in March 2014 by Spoonbill Books, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Put Your Hands In's Boston launch was presented by The Harvard Advocate at their Harvard Square headquarters, and included supporting readings by Peter Gizzi, Josh Bell, and Christina Davis (poet), curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University..

Double Zero

Hosea's second book of poems, Double Zero, was published in 2016 by Prelude. Poet Ben Fama called the collection "by turns melancholy, fragmented, and true to feeling....a book-length artist statement via linguistic selfies," and claimed that Double Zero "accurately maps the experience of the contemporary subject."

The Brooklyn Rail declared Hosea's poetry "a statement for our generation," and claimed that "Hosea’s excess of language and sensation, more than any recent poetry collection, captures the unlimited economy of text and experience in 2016, a life that is constantly refreshing as our thumbs push forward on our personal screens, 'pictures quoted in pictures.'”

Writing in Jacket2, poet and critic Joe Fletcher described Double Zero as follows: "These poems reject the model of surface and substratum, linear chains of logic, narrative, or meditation — poetry that conceals and ultimately bestows upon the diligent reader a kernel of meaning. Instead, Hosea’s poems are horizontally distributed linguistic planes, glittering splinters of the quotidian sliding through one another, shrapnel of heterogeneous temporalities."

Double Zero was named a "Best Poetry Book of 2016" by Flavorwire and Entropy Magazine.

Artwork, Curation, and Residencies

Hosea's visual-art collaboration with painter Kim Bennett was the subject of a 2015 exhibition at Bushwick, Brooklyn gallery Transmitter.

Also included in the Transmitter show were selected postcards from Hosea's ongoing mail-art project The postcard project (aka "What do you feel?) (2012-present), during the course of which Hosea has personally distributed, so far, in New York City and several other US locations, over 2,000 self-addressed, stamped postcards requesting participants respond to the rubber-stamped question "What do you feel?" Over 200 have been returned to date.

In 2020, The Metropolitan Museum of Art produced and released a short video featuring The postcard project.

Another of Hosea's serial artworks, the pop-up performance Free Poetry (2014-ongoing), features the artist plying a manual typewriter to create spontaneous poems tailored to the specifications of audience members. Free Poetry has been performed, live and in-person, at Ugly Duckling Presse and Art Omi, among other spaces.

So Many Fortresses (2010-2012), a collaboration with artist Jane Hsu, is a two-channel spoken word and video piece is in dialogue with the 2011 Adam Pendleton video installation BAND at The Kitchen (art institution). The video script consists of an extended riff from notes taken by Hosea during several visits to the Pendleton video installation, recorded in one take in the Sky Room at the New Museum. So Many Fortresses was shared online, and later performed, with live improvisations, at Ran Tea House in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Hosea was curator of the 2012 group show "Ode to Street Hassle" at BronxArtSpace that featured Zoe Leonard, Amy Touchette, Myles Paige, Kim Bennett, Kimi Hodges, and others.

Beginning in 2011, Hosea was curator of the Brooklyn-based Blue Letter Reading Series,. Readers included Saeed Jones, Eileen Myles, and Tracy K. Smith, who read at Blue Letter's first event, in February 2011. The Blue Letter series was named "Best Reading Series (Poetry)" in New York City by The L Magazine.

Hosea also curated (2018-2020), the One Bleecker Reading Series at Codex Books in Noho, Manhattan. Featured performers have included Andrew Durbin, Bunny Rogers, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Carly Dashiell, Rachelle Rahmé, John Godfrey, current Academy of American Poets President Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, Valerie Hsiung, and Masha Tupitsyn.

Hosea is the recipient of fellowship residencies from Vermont Studio Center, Writers Omi Ledig House, and Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village, Nova Scotia. Hosea was also the recipient of 2016 and 2019 artist residencies from the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

Bibliography

• "Put Your Hands In" (LSU Press, 2014) Author Page at LSU Press. First paperback edition out of print. E-Book available from LSU Press. Second paperback edition underway.
• "Double Zero" (Prelude, 2016) Remaining paperback copies available from Grolier Poetry Bookshop.

External links

• Chris Hosea Author Page at the Academy of American Poets
• Chris Hosea Author Page at The Poetry Foundation
• Chris Hosea Author Page at LSU Press
• Chris Hosea Author Page at Prelude Books