Skip to main content
Books, videos, and music - all free from your public library!
LoginSign Up

Footer

Hoopla logo, Go to homepage
  • For Patrons
  • For Libraries (opens in new window)
  • For Vendors (opens in new window)
  • Facebook (opens in new window)
  • X (opens in new window)
  • Instagram (opens in new window)
  • YouTube (opens in new window)
  • TikTok (opens in new window)
  • LinkedIn (opens in new window)

Our Company

  • Our Story
  • Get Hoopla for your Library (opens in new window)
  • Get your content on hoopla (opens in new window)
  • Join our team (opens in new window)
  • Accessibility Statement

Our Content

  • Audiobooks
  • Ebooks
  • Movies
  • Television
  • Comics
  • BingePasses
  • Music
  • The Loop Blog

Help

  • Help Center
  • Submit Feedback
  • Facebook (opens in new window)
  • X (opens in new window)
  • Instagram (opens in new window)
  • YouTube (opens in new window)
  • TikTok (opens in new window)
  • LinkedIn (opens in new window)
  • Download on the App Store (opens in new window)
  • Get it on Google Play (opens in new window)
  • Available at Amazon Appstore (opens in new window)
© 2026 Midwest Tape, LLC. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy | Terms of Use
  • Hoopla logo
  • Browse
  • My Hoopla
  • Log In
  1. Navigate Home
  3. Ebooks

  4. Honest Engine

EBOOK

Honest Engine

Poems

Kyle Dargan
4.3
(4)
sign up
Pages
96
Year
2015
Language
English
Publisher
University of Georgia Press

About

In this his fourth collection, award-winning poet Kyle Dargan examines the mechanics of the heart and mind as they are weathered by loss. Following a spate of deaths among family and friends, Dargan chooses to present not color-negative elegies but self-portraits that capture what of these departed figures remains within him. Amid this processing of mortality, it becomes clear that he has arrived at a turning point as a writer and a man.

As the title suggests, Dargan aspires toward an unflinching honesty. These poems do not purport to possess life's answers or seek to employ language to mask what they do not know. Dargan confesses as a means of reaching out to the nomadic human soul and inviting it to accompany him on a walk toward the unknown.

Related Subjects

  • American
  • Poetry
  • Adult Nonfiction
  • African American & Black

Reviews

"Honest Engine's ultimate lesson is that home is the place of the necessary labors. And as the book that highlights a four-volume journey though the rough terrains of America, it's a refreshingly prayerful and sympathetic view."
Rigoberto González, Los Angeles Review of Books
"These are complex subjects, and Sommers navigates them with a self-aware and intersectional lens, conscientiously refusing to replicate the denial of agency he critiques in contemporary government and international development policy."
Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books
"This Honest Engine is unafraid. It asks questions that men rarely ask: Is there a cure for patriarchy? Must I also think like a fist? Will grief and loss swamp us? Sometimes, true, with the poet we wrestle despair, 'tumbling from an apex of grace.' But memory can restore, can 'make enough flames bloom.' Indeed, Kyle Dargan's stunning, hurting poems bring us finally to a wary hopefulness that we m
Sarah Browning, executive director of Split This Rock and author of Whiskey in the Garden

Artists

Kyle DarganAuthor