Tony Hoagland was born Anthony Dey Hoagland on November 19, 1953, in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Very little biographical information as of 2003 was available on Hoagland, yet scholars of his work point to various known autobiographical poems that help draw a slim profile of him. Growing up in white, middle-class American suburbia—a theme in much of his poetic work—Hoagland seems to have been at odds with the wholesale materialism of his environment, viewing it with both cynicism and a desire to understand it. While his parents were able to provide him a comfortable childhood in the physical and monetary sense, Hoagland's poems tell the story of emotional upheavals within the family that mere money could not make up for. Apparently, his father intentionally ruined his own marriage (thus the title of Hoagland's first fulllength collection, Sweet Ruin) and then died of a heart attack a short...