The Show

by Evelyn Hooven (April 2024)

I can’t review it
I don’t much like the work
It’s not her best.

You must. She’s in debt.
Needs a sold-out show.

I’m an art critic
Not a bank.

This time, can’t you be both?

When I saw the name
Of an old acquaintance
On the purchase list
I almost broke my silence.
But hadn’t he seen and chosen?
Wasn’t the lighting good?

My old Puritan background
Stirs forth—
Did I save her farm
But hurt the earth?

I expected punishment
Writer’s block, I thought
Not so. Not yet?

Something else—
My wife’s face
Avarice
Zeal to win
Hopeless distance
From the pure fact
Of creation…

To try to love her
I need darkened space;
Here, to my eyes—
Not enough darkness

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Evelyn Hooven graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received her M.A. from Yale University, where she also studied at The Yale School of Drama. A member of the Dramatists’ Guild, she has had presentations of her verse dramas at several theatrical venues, including The Maxwell Anderson Playwrights Series in Greenwich, CT (after a state-wide competition) and The Poet’s Theatre in Cambridge, MA (result of a national competition). Her poems and translations from the French and Spanish have appeared in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, ART TIMES, Chelsea, The Literary Review, THE SHOp: A Magazine of Poetry (in Ireland), The Tribeca Poetry Review, Vallum (in Montreal), and other journals, and her literary criticism in Oxford University’s Essays in Criticism.

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