Truth or

The title of Cynthia Hogue's Or Consequence conjures the phrase "truth or consequences." The game show by that name ran on and off on radio, then television, for decades. Contestants had to answer obscure trivia questions truthfully or, because they usually couldn't answer correctly or quickly, faced consequences. These consequences were always surprises, sometimes gags or stunts, and occasionally sentimental reunions. Hogue's poetry collection, of course, is no game show, but the poems recognize that truth slips away as the buzzer cuts off our thoughts and that the real stuff of life is not truth per se. In the title poem, Hogue writes, "Aren't we bound at least by consequence? // To have turned things around. Lies truth and truth lies." It's the consequences that are the true experiences of this world. Or Consequence embodies the effects we experience and our sense of their causes. The poems are inferences.

The word "consequence" comes from the Latin meaning "to follow with, to track together." In Hogue's poems, the reader follows beside, even from the first lines of the opening poem, "Étude (on Love)":

I have been all thiswhile in transit which is tosay without a clearaim in mind....

The speaker is already moving, and we keep step, watching images unfold and figuring things out right alongside.

The collection includes five études, three in the first section and two in the last. "Étude" means "study"; Hogue writes studies of love, power, listening, trust, and memory. Traditionally, an étude is a musical composition, relatively difficult and used to practice or demonstrate a particular technique. The technique to which I keep returning with admiration is Hogue's use of line break. In the opening étude are the following lines:

Do we all go throughthis floating from time

to time when the self cannot seethe self so close in its needto control, which is the urgeto have nothing

change? This desire....

Each line carries its own sense, and also creates meaning with the lines before and after. We are first floating from—as a result of, away from—time and then floating from time to time—occasionally. Similarly, line breaks recast a blind self into a self that's not self-aware, then recasts the idea that a person is indistinct from her needs into the idea that the individual has the need to control. Likewise, "the urge / to have nothing" becomes the desire that "nothing // change."

Detail from cover

In The Sounds of Poetry (1998), Robert Pinsky observes of line breaks, "the syntax is trying to speed up the line, and the line is trying to slow down the syntax." He calls this a "pull or dance," and that's what Hogue's lines do. They dance together, pulling back and pushing forward to create richness of meaning. In The Art of the Poetic Line (2007), James Longenbach argues for the term "line ending" rather than "line break," to capture "the shifting effects of three ways of ending the line: annotating lines, parsing lines, and end-stopped lines." The lines excerpted from "Étude (on Love)" are beautifully annotating in Longenbach's terms: "rather than following the grammatical units, the lines cut against them, annotating the syntax with emphasis that the syntax would not otherwise provide."

Another way Hogue employs line endings—annotating, and also parsed and end-stopped—is to dole out images or ideas line by line. The senses focus on one thing, then another, as a scene unfolds. The middle of section 1 of "Étude (on Power)" demonstrates this mixing of line endings and this pacing:

Your eyes scaling the wall,rappelling down the other side. Fear

fear no more,the heat of it.

You sit across fromempty cartons

cluttering the round tableof the new office. Cathedral-

ceilinged. The burnished glow of veranda shadescovering a porch's antique calm.

The reader's mind moves up a wall, then down the other side, each line creating distinct movement. The rappelling induces fear, but the next stanza redefines that fear. The reader imagines sitting, then notices the cartons across the way, then the table, finally taking in the entirety of the scene as an office. A cathedral becomes high ceilings, then light from behind shades. The poems mete things out.

Repetition in Or Consequence also becomes a way of recasting—multiplying—meaning and controlling pace. Nowhere is this more deftly done than in "Enough Pain to Go Around." The poem's premise is that the word "pain" is pronounced differently in French and in English and means different things: "bread" or "hurt." The speaker has read that a man said something about "'enough pain to go around.' If / I'd heard him I would know how / he pronounced pain. Either / way, it's a problem." Language is a tricky endeavor, if what is written can mean two distinct things. The problem is not lost meaning; the real problem is that we accumulate extra meanings, which is, of course, the beauty of Hogue's poems. The poem's end captures what's enticing, endearing, and evocative about the collection:

I'm talking aroundwhat I'm talking about because,really, I don't know where to startto stop pain, or some might say,break bread.

Do you?              Do you?

Language is pleasurable for Hogue, even in the face pain, even in the face of—or as a result of—ambiguity and its possibilities.

Some of the poems are more prosy ("On Bumps River") or self-conscious ("The Fact of Speech"), but Hogue's poetic technique serves each poem. And often, the poems are hard hitting, even political. "The Green Card Is Not Green" and "An Hour from Town (Terezín)" are two particularly poignant and historically resonant poems, both dealing with who is an insider or outsider, who has what sort of home, and who is right, has rights, practices rites, and can write. Another poem overtly historical-political is the middle section of the collection, "New Orleans Suite: Ars Cora/Under Erasure." In the note that precedes this section, Hogue explains that she draws "upon a slave story I never forgot," the story of Arsene, also known as Cora, the last slave to sue for her freedom and back wages—she "won her case and disappeared from all records." Here, Hogue creates a new record for Arsene/Cora.

Or Consequence is Cynthia Hogue's sixth poetry collection and her second from Red Hen Press, a nonprofit literary press started in 1994. Her recent work also includes When the Water Came (2010), a book about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath drawn from interviews with Gulf Coast residents, along with photographs by Rebecca Ross. Hogue edited, with Elisabeth Frost, the anthology Innovative Women Poets (2007), which includes poems and interviews. Cynthia Hogue, through her poetry and other projects, is shaping contemporary American poetry. Or Consequence concludes, then, with a linguistic and political trajectory: "What we know is / hope, and say, We are / hopeful, we have hope."