Hope and Compulsion is Rodger LeGrand's third collection of poems. In 2008 Pudding House Press published his second collection, Waking Up On a Sinking Boat, and in 2005 Finishing Line Press published his first collection, Various Ways of Thinking About the Universe. His poems and reviews have appeared in The Cortland Review, The Atlanta Review, Paper Street, The Apple Valley Review, The Boston Literary Magazine, The Adirondack Review, and FreeVerse. He studied writing at Sarah Lawrence College and the State University of New York at Oswego. Currently, he lives in Collingswood, New Jersey and is a Writing Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Feel free to contact him at rodgerlegrand@yahoo.com.

"Hope and Compulsion is a little jewel of a chapbook, deserving of a place on any ardent reader's bookshelf. The poetry is rich and musical and fervid, capturing its readers immediately and sequestering them in LeGrand's gritty, romantic world. In love with the sensory, LeGrand celebrates material reality, writing of such pleasures as the sound of a lover's breathing, the scent of apples chopped for a pie, and of the warm depression left in a bed by a lover's body. But LeGrand is no dupe; he's also keenly alert to life's many indignities. Thus he also writes with agonizing skill of devastated things. Here are the lives of the homeless, the ache of arthritis in exhausted bones, and the toll of slopping the hogs day after unrelenting day. But rather than despair in such dark moments, LeGrand discovers a new buoyancy, a new resilience. He devises a means of using rhythm to link inventive language and image to the vicissitudes of degraded social spaces until, ultimately, his poetic creations generate transformed life.
Even better, he's unafraid to articulate all of this in boldly lucid language, coming in a chapbook design that itself smartly underscores this. It begins with the off-kilter cover type, through which readers are introduced visually to the book's greatest theme: how to value a life continuously unsettled and reconfiguring. And through that (com)motion, LeGrand shows his readers how to look anew at the world, how to find wisdom in the basest suffering, how to find humor in humiliation, and how to unleash joy and wonder by destabilizing the prefabricated and foreknown. He therefore closes his collection with an aptly lyrical insistence upon the importance of "this moment / this one, this one, this one." And for that, his most astute readers will prove reinvigorated, changed, and grateful."
~ Seth Michelson, Maestro of Brutal Splendor, Kaddish for My Unborn Son, and The Ghetto

"If Bacon, Wyeth, or Hopper had used words rather than pigments, these are the works I suspect they would have created. LeGrand's verse is poignant, playful, and always evocative."
~Michael C. Keith, The Next Better Place

"In Hope and Compulsion, LeGrand conveys the rawness of human existence in an understated but self-aware manner that woos the reader with beauty of language as well as trueness of ideas."
~ Heather Cadenhead, The Basilica Review