PositiveThe Brooklyn RailHoke’s syntax throughout is a marvel, capturing the effect of someone new to a language saying the darndest things, and yet summoning up that penetrating ideas often arrive in simple delivery. The book unfolds in a single sentence over approximately eighteen thousand words ... Hoke’s sentence takes pause in the form of line and chapter breaks and spare prose ... A particular word used only in jacket copy stands out: applying the word queer to the lion. Like a period at the end of a sentence, what use does a mountain lion have with this word? ... All these existential and formal queries aside, which are worthy of investigating through writing, and to which the imperatives belong to our apophatic Human Imaginations broadly, here is what I really want to say. Open Throat is a tight, funny book with an alarmingly unique tone, and with an ending that redeems itself from all the questions that pad along the way.
