PRAISE FOR SOFT OBLITERATION

“Gabrielle Grace Hogan is a light, a poet they will one day name mountains after. Like Frank O’Hara channeling Carly Rae Jepsen, lesbian and cosmically alive, Hogan doesn't just master her voice in Soft Obliteration. She turns it into a CD jammed inside every car stereo, letting its beautiful goodness spill onto the laps of everyone it meets. Soft Obliteration reads like a coming-of-age story, but with faith in its own messy and honest ending. It’s sexy and it’s devastating, but it’s also breathing. God, is it breathing. It’s a blooming butterfly of gender dreaming of what waits on the other side of itself. A tightened first of intercontinental, kaleidoscopic writing. Soft Obliteration is exactly the poetic debut we need right now to fill up our longing and worried hearts.” 

— Matt Mitchell, author of The Neon Hollywood Cowboy

“Everything and nothing about Hogan's verse is soft. The malleability of form is struck against the rigidity of feeling— deep anxiety, stiff melancholy, a few tough shreds of hope. She taps into a litheness of language that runs over each intimate relationship described, turning them into a concrete smack against the forehead. Each poem becomes another limb added to the fleshy body of a speaker whose skin only gets more calloused. All of this to say— this debut is a resilient victory of both poet and speaker, a lyric galvanization of queer mess that carves a space for itself within the contemporary sphere of poetry.”

— Rob Colgate, author of So Dark the Gap