Kirkus Review for Featured RHP Publication

“Hays creates an environment that’s heavily influenced by the writing of poets that … forged our contemporary understanding of poetry. The book opens with ‘Inscriptions,’ … epigraphs, setting the tone for what’s to come—elegiac proclamations about the natural world, the oneness of man with nature, and the unpredictability of passion. … [T]he poet’s incorporation of epigraphs to launch his poems is … helpful to situate the persona’s framework. … Hays then divides his book into […]

banishing blacklisted, rebuked

to be forsaken and unset as from a form of Vishnu, his turning third Veda-face pivoting in a storm of Sanskrit terror to eradicate man asleep from Shiva-Rudra impending in heat and famine and waste; and Enough!   Enough, because poetry arcing —Artistry—is our chance to rave returning, to reverse Indra’s rain, uncursed, to rant back like Furies unloosed as maddening whisper daggers slashing, being born from emasculation as maddening whisper daggers slashing, to reverse […]

RHP excerpt from Pooled Ink contest of Northern Colorado Writers

primal contentment like a burly elegant pirate behind an English mustache and gritty eye patch, Sir Adrian could summon little from The Book, abandoned in rubble, of Common Prayer to parry why he fought, why overlooking, one-eyed, at downtown London in Nazi shambles, steeping a dirty World War II tea bag on a broken veranda smoldering, Carton de Wiart self-knowing it was that he was there —England there— instead of another empire —always rising or […]

lovelorn – language stunting

toast preposterous jammed jelly bright; blast, breaking the triangle fast; blast; collision—train stalled—oil staining us as embers stabbed in splendor, stoked   Stella, lay low, the light, our life, is theft; monster moons vacuum villainous our volumes, the large before, our us as previous, lost   big rigging, maiming Miss Stella mine in vain discontent rut tired sick; flip the jacks flapped, tomcat; flap little bird canticles cracked