"James Hoch's A Parade of Hands is the work of a very gifted young poet for whom the lyric is both discovery and song. I'm drawn to his grave tones and graceful formal aptitude, in poems alternately hard as "steel piled in a yard" and mysterious as "a handful / of winged insects throbbing against glass." There is real peril here, not just the faux of melodrama one finds in much new poetry; and real experience — of travel, of work, of loves found and lives lost. Each line of these excellent poems is real, worked-over, lucid, revealing, melodic, and true."
- David Baker

"In much of this book, the source of that sickness are fathers, like his own who, the poet remembers, put a hand on his head in the shower and made him feel belonged, yet with the same hand took him behind the shed and "split him like a log," as Hoch describes in a prose poem entitled "Squash." Such family violence is not Hoch's alone. A part of the complexity of "Squash" is how the speaker moves from his self-described "spoiled boy's story" to his wife's story about her father, "who slept on the couch, too drunk to make it to his wife, the sound of him rising from the couch, the booze smell starting up the stairs, and the weight like a beam falling into a crowd." The book spreads out like this, away from the given traumas of childhood toward acts of communal sharing and momentary grace."
- Billy Reynolds