Real Sofistikashun Robert Peake shares his review of Tony Hoagland’s Real Sofistikashun and Contemporary Poetics. Hoagland brings so much insight to bear on the strengths and perils of writing to the contemporary sensibility – a sensibility that seems to simultaneously crave both cohesion and disjunction. He does not dismiss anything within the spectrum, but finds virtue in everything from Ashberry to Oliver. His essays progress with almost dialectic momentum, bouncing from pole to pole before evenutally settling, in the final essay, on Hoagland’s own personal approach to reconciling the emotional, confessional, romantic and imagistic with a modern distrust of all of these qualities.