American Anger by H.L. Hix (review)

“Naming the problem doesn’t help,” reports one of the unnamed voices in H.L. Hix’s poetry collection, American Anger. Impatiently, she outlines the reasons for her anger: the sexual abuse her father inflicted on her when she was a child, her mother’s indifference to her suffering and the mother’s early death, her own heavy drinking, and subsequent “bad relationships with bad men.” She does not detail any of these disturbing situations; the poem does not develop any into a story or even an anecdote. Each moment is presented in brief summary. “There are only bad relationships,” she observes in a statement true of nearly every relationship depicted in American Anger. The book relentlessly introduces a nation of pissed-off citizens, prone to violence, reeling from the pain of personal tragedies and petty insults, inflicting their misery on both those close to them and strangers.

Hix’s best poetry is strange and disturbing when it pursues the author’s obsessions, often expressed in obsessive formal structures. American Anger confirms he is an important poet; his disorienting poems challenge readers to re-envision what the art can do. Trained as a philosopher, Hix retains a skepticism about many of the functions and techniques historically associated with lyric poetry. He distrusts narrative (even though he has a talent for it: his sequence “A Manual of Happiness” in his 2002 collection, Surely As Birds Fly, is one of the most impressive narrative sequences published by an American poet during the last several decades). He hardly ever aims to craft moments of lyric beauty. On the rare occasions when he allows one to enter his poems (though I found none in American Anger), its effect is more threatening than comforting, as if the reader were punished for enjoying this respite from the world’s horror. The ideal of a single lyric poem read in isolation does not seem to appeal to Hix. Hix’s poems tend to work best in collections, not individually, where they gain a cumulative force, as they batter each other and the reader.

American Anger is Hix’s twelfth poetry collection and his most topical, published amidst a presidential campaign buffeted by waves of grievance and outrage. American Anger contains several kinds of poems. Each section ends with an author’s note, in which Hix apparently rails against the university where he works and the state where he lives. Other poems play variations on the printing convention, “This page intentionally left blank.” In Hix’s rendering, the page is intentionally left “hostile,” “forfeited to fundamentalism,” or “complacent and self-satisfied.” These two kinds of poem offer comic respite from the rest of the book’s bleakness. In its dramatic monologues, unhinged, mainly lower-class white Americans vent racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic views, often in racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic language. Another section translates classical texts, primarily ancient Greek, on the subject of anger. A series of quasi-unryhmed sonnets quote eminent academics (Martha Nussbaum, Sara Ahmed, and Paul Woodruff) as they offer their insights on how anger should be understood. “But don’t take my word for it, when we have / Martha Nussbaum’s,” the first opens.

American Anger is most successful when its point of view—and, therefore, its politics—remain the least discernible. The best poems strip away fixed points of moral orientation; they do not establish speakers as either moral authorities or moral villains. I would like the poems that quote Nussbaum, Ahmed, and Woodruff better if I did not suspect that I was meant to accept them as authorities, to give special consideration to their views. The notion that we should “take” their “word” (in the poem’s phrase) undercuts the more powerful and more disquieting notion that anger engulfs all of us. Similarly, some of the dramatic monologues establish a moral superiority to the speakers. The speakers are easier to dismiss because we are not included in their pathology. Their attitudes and language set them apart.

The collection’s most powerful poems achieve a different effect. As titles such as...