{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.032003507233669445, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004384042086804033, 'mean_word_length': 4.662531017369727, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Hard Facts (excerpts), 1973-75, and: Black + Blues (review)

burial of the dead, naming is a ritual of our deepest contradictions," Hazard informs us near the beginning of the poem. By the poem's end we have discovered that the contradictions include the battles between whites and Indians, between rich and poor, between sawmill owners and union organizers, between settlers and wilderness. In the end the town is named, not after the sawmill magnate, as the plutocrats intended, but after a seedy Menominee Indian chief. Thus in the names of any map of the Middle West, not only in those borrowed from Indian languages but also in the place names memorializing feats of skill or endurance, you will find printed reminders of how recent our rise to power was, and how vulnerable it remains. Hazard dramatizes the settlement of the whole region through his account of the naming of Oshkosh. In the final poem-sequence, "The Snow Crazy Copybook," Hazard presents a narrator who, fleeing the bitter depths of the Depression in 1934, encloses himself with his memories in a shack in the Wisconsin northwoods. This exiled consciousness, cloistered in its cabin, fronting the blizzards and the glacier, speculating at long distance on events political and metaphysical, is typical of Hazard's own telescopic relation to politics and to what passes for current events. But the narrator cautions us against concluding that, isolated though he is physically, he is also isolated mentally. "What I find here is I have left nothing behind. I have brought it all with me. Even the arguments. . .". Hazard has also brought it all with him: all the contradictions and anxieties of American life, has brought it all into his memories of childhood, his yarns about the era of Midwestern settlement, his cinematic fantasies, even into the reveries in this northwoods shack. "I was out shouting this afternoon," his snowcrazy narrator says, "but in the snowfall my voice was muffled. Like the snow was microscope animals eating the sounds of my shouting. Later I brought in a bucket of snow to melt for drinking water, and then drank that brew of snow and my own voice." There you have his poetry: a brew of experiences as commonplace as snow, that yields, when melted, a human voice. Scott Sanders