Last week on the Seattle Poetry Chain, the delightful Rachel Kessler whipped out a pantoum. I was highly pleased to publish a pantoum on Slog. A couple of foolish commenters didn't seem to understand that a pantoum requires you to repeat lines; otherwise it wouldn't be a pantoum. But ultimately everybody agreed that Kessler's poem was constructed out of materials that are almost too awesome for this world and poetry was saved for another generation.

This week, Kessler has chosen Rebecca Hoogs to continue the Poetry Chain. Hoogs is the first poet on the Poetry Chain in ten weeks I've actually met in person and I can tell you that she's a lovely human being. But here's what Kessler has to say about her:

Rebecca Hoogs is poetry’s dream date. She digs around in language, exploding words, and carefully crafts a poem-raft from the shards. “Cliché literally meant ‘stamped in metal’… I want to take language back to its original, concrete form and reanimate it,” I heard her say on the radio. Her poems dink around with multiple meanings, with the sound of language and what the words mean, but are solid, like rocks, in my mouth. Not only does she reanimate words, she brings all kinds of poetry to Seattle, sends poets into Seattle’s schools and inspires teachers and students of poetry at Seattle Arts & Lectures. She is wicked smart and funny and wears nice, sexy shoes and I am so happy that she wrote a whole poem about the word “suck” that ends with the line “I suck.”

According to Verse Daily, "Rebecca Hoogs' poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Journal, and Seneca Review. She received her MFA from the University of Washington and currently lives in Seattle." If you follow that link to VD (haw!), you'll find links to three other of Hoogs's poems. But here is the poem Rebecca Hoogs would like to share with us:

Many thanks to Rachel Kessler and especially many thanks to Rebecca Hoogs. Tune in next week to discover who Hoogs picks for the next poet on the Seattle Poetry Chain.