Allen Hoey (October 21, 1952 – June 16, 2010) was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic who received numerous honors during his lifetime, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his 2008 collection of poems Country Music.
Hoey's second novel, Voices Beyond the Dead, a more politically oriented book, was released in the summer of 2007, and his fifth collection of poems, Country Music, was published in spring 2008.
[3] Of his first collection, A Fire in the Cold House of Being, Hayden Carruth noted: "The directness of Allen Hoey’s poems amounts at times almost to a kind of existential obduracy, the smack of a fist in the palm that means no more bravery, the job is being.
When you put this together with Hoey’s marvelous vocabulary and his exacting rhythmic and tonal demands on our language, you get what no academic poetry can ever attain, real pertinence.
Ranging from free verse to formal structures but never straying far from an anchoring pentameter or tetrameter line, Hoey’s subtle lyricism sounds most like the speech of the straightforward, wry upstate New York and New England folks he prefers to write about….
Already in A Fire in the Cold House of Being Hoey demonstrated intelligence, skill with both meter and free verse, a sure sense of poetic shape, and a talent for natural description.
Among the works published by Tamarack were Hayden Carruth's The Mythology of Dark and Light and Mother, as well as Kochan by Jack Gilbert.
Prior to his death, Hoey was at work on a series of detective novels featuring the character Dan Flannigan and his friend Otis Beaudrieux.