Continued Cases is a collection of poems satirical, social, and political. A sequel to Hague's Public Hearings (Word Press, 2009) it was written partly in response to the 45th presidency of the United States. It addresses practices, policies, and personalities as well as opines on education, the arts, and the fate of the environment. One of the book's epigraphs is from the 2017 prayer card at the funeral of Wayne Barret, author of Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention. "Our credo must be the exposure of the plunderers, the steerers, the wirepullers, the bosses, the brokers, the campaign givers and takers ... So I say: Stew, percolate, pester, track, burrow, besiege, confront, damage, level, care." In Continued Cases, Hague does his best to offer opposition to the outlandish, the illegal, the inhumane. At the same time, as a native Appalachian from the Ohio Valley steel town declared in the l970s to have the worst air in the country, he recollects the personal damages of industrial extractive industry. Aware of the agrarian traditions of Jefferson, the democratic, populist appetites of Whitman, and the counter-cultural politics of the Sixties, Hague offers seasoned witness to our times.
