Secret Third Thing

Dan Hogan's Secret Third Thing is a hyper-real comment on this hyper-real moment: it is suffused with internet culture and reflections on the lives we live, now, largely online. What characterises Hogan's poetry is the way that, each time we come close to fully apprehending the impending collapse of capitalism, we are waylaid by something more urgent and mundane. To be non-binary, as these poems show, is not to just be a secret third thing; it is to bring class consciousness to bear upon gender.

Above anything else, then, this collection is a work of dialectical materialism. It not only insistently names class struggle, but also highlights its generative potential: the notion that the opposition of the two classes may not be (only) destructive, but lead to the creation of something else: a third, new thing. - Eda Gunaydin