Reclamation: Essays, the new chapbook from Portland author Justin Hocking, looks under the surface—into caves and mines, geological formations, buried memories, and secrets. Released last week, the chapbook mixes the personal with the historical, the lyrical with the journalistic, and spans centuries in an attempt to unearth what’s been hidden underground.
Part of a larger memoir-in-progress, the six short essays in Reclamation form what Hocking calls “an encapsulated excerpt”—a distilled selection from a larger whole that hints at the book’s trajectory and presents all the memoir’s different threads. It’s a technique he used while writing his first memoir, the Oregon Book Award-winning The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld. He published a short chapbook called Beach 90th while the book was still in the works to “get a piece of it out into the world.”
In Reclamation, Hocking works in a manner similar to writers like Maggie Nelson, John D’Agata, and Eliot Weinberger, assembling a variety of seemingly disparate histories and connecting them to a larger theme or narrative. During Hocking’s navigation of the subterranean, he brings together his experiences caving as a teenager, a mine disaster that occurred near his home town in Colorado, the etymology of the word exploit, the TV show Hogan’s Heroes, the Gnostic Gospels, the secret life of John James Audubon, and his personal history as a victim of sexual abuse.