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One doesn’t read HOAX--it spills into you. Holding and moving through this feral, magical punk odyssey was like tonguing rough glyphs etched into a mirror, then discovering my body’s outline at the bottom of an oil slicked, holy pond. Joey’s magic serves to make meaning in a world where our interconnectedness is effaced or turned against us; they reclaim mystery for our daily selves, with epiphanic gusto alerting us to honor the wild essence of life. Grief, desire, and outrage evaginate into a portal they draw us through where we can read signs in the sky, down their navel, in the complex detritus of the environment--and find ourselves brightly contiguous with the apocryphal. Joey’s celestographs invited me to rediscover stargazing with wild wonder. My unfathomable child spirit quickened with this text. If there’s a hoax to HOAX, I prefer Joey’s beautiful deception of being audaciously alertly alive.

Sueyeun Juliette Lee, author of AERIAL CONCAVE WITHOUT CLOUD

Joey De Jesus returns poetry to its ancient divinatory powers in this extraordinary new work: “we are talking fog,” says the poet, says the soothsayer. 108 is an equation from the present to the present whenever it enters itself, gifted back to us in these poems. The poetics of abolition requires care for others, and here is the poet to show us how mindfulness of such an order has the same tender approach in the magic of song.

CAConrad, author of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration

A hoax is a trick but a trick that is successful because it could almost be real. In times and days when the 'almost' between the real and irreal evaporates, species vanish and the air and water themselves tremble with imminent danger, shamans and diviners of great commitment must the earth enter. Then too all language is a hoax that asks you to believe one thing over another, one reality as victor and others as banished, shadow certainties, less certain, less believed. Ghosts come into Joey's pieces but not ghosts, sound, and not a book but a chthonic demand, a word or re-ordering of perceptual reality by a verbal art of the greatest commitment to soul and personhood. I find the most local beauty in these epic poems, epic in their hope and ambition, daily in their attentions. I think Joey must have magic powers: to be a poet of such love and precision yet also be a warrior-angel-daimon yet also be a deliberate and careful and strategic community builder and activist. Aren't these qualities divergent? All things come together in this HOAX, an accomplished work that enables all who read and encounter to be transformed.

Kazim Ali