The Prophet’s Toothbrush by Elia Hohauser-Thatcher

The Prophet’s Toothbrush—what a perfect title to this riveting collection that combines the sacred and the mundane. These poems are rugged and honest and haunting in their spare and often bleak truths. But while there’s toughness here, there’s also a hard-earned tenderness. He digs deep to explore and examine various versions of manhood and intimacy within the close confines of home and family. Hohauser-Thatcher is a promising young poet whose intense gaze doesn’t miss a thing.

–Jim Daniels

The Prophet’s Toothbrush wrestles with growing up human in a family chock-full of endearing, difficult humans. From this home emerges a young man troubled by a world with all its violent expectations for men, a speaker willing to do the painstaking work of exploring and rejecting these expectations simultaneously. These poems work on us with a resonant, unapologetic sense of self and narrative integrity. To read them is discover yourself mercifully less alone in a bewildering world.

–Heather McNaugher 

“Something unsettled and unsettling always lurks beneath the surfaces of these marvelously crafted, observant, tough-minded and deeply moving poems. In The Prophet’s Toothbrush, Elia Hohauser-Thatcher explores with unflinching honesty his own past, his family history, and the world of which he is a part. These wrenchingly beautiful poems grapple for and achieve a difficult grace, and this collection announces the arrival of a terrific new voice.”

–Aaron Baker