The Natural Hustle

An astonishing, inventive new collection of poems from the author of Rotten Perfect Mouth.

Includes the poem “Bonedog” featured in the film I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Shortlist

Deeply attuned to the cadence of life, the poems in The Natural Hustle offer provocative, intimate snapshots. They explore the bewildering experience of living—precisely locating unexpected truths. Ingenious, original, surprising, here is a one-of-a-kind poetic voice.Praise for Eva H.D. and The Natural Hustle

“Inventive, intelligent, and crackling with energy, the poems in The Natural Hustle invite the reader to pay close attention to those everyday experiences and interactions we might otherwise pass over. They do so in language that is rich with all the energy of the Beats, a brilliant, humming, at times vulgar musicality.” —Pat Lowther Memorial Award Jury

“Eva H.D. uses an economy of words to suggest an entire world of light and darkness, of longing and pain and beauty. Her poetry reminds me to look at small things: the ripple of water in a pond, the colour of a blue spruce right before sunrise, the quiet despair in the eyes of a person I pass on the street, the texture of the lime green chewing gum I stepped on while looking at the quiet despair in the eyes of that person I passed on the street.” —Charlie Kaufman, author of Antkind, writer/director of Synecdoche, New York

“Eva H.D. [is] a poet of extraordinary merit and ability, and an artist of the first order.” —Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Homeland Elegies

“Eva is an extraordinary pirate queen who is restlessly on a quest to swim in the unchartered moments that often are hidden within the habitual monotony of the everyday.” —Jessie BuckleyEVA H.D. is the author of Rotten Perfect Mouth, Light Wounds (with photographer Kendall Townend), and the short film Jackals & Fireflies.Magic Hour, Manhattan, August

The city’s histamine blush as dusk drips.
We seek a sportsbar ’cause you think it would
be nice if I could watch the Jays; all good
I say, as—the towers flush like stung lips—

I think walking next to you is heaven.
And I say, Look at these buildings [and you
look, nod] in the witching light [rose flange you
shuffle through]. It’s as if they had been leavened:

surging tongues stained sweet nectarine, liver.
Every sportsbar is too loud. It’s okay:
I’d rather watch instead the dying day;
my hometown sold me down the river,

long ago. The air we breathe in thins,
purpling.

It’s enough the home team wins.