Paul Hunter – reading/signing Q and A at BookTree
April 22nd (Earth Day) Award-winning poet/writer/small press publisher Paul Hunter will be sharing his latest book Clownery: In Lieu of a Life Spent in Harness starting at 4 p.m.
Paul will do an informal Q and A, read and then sign books. Paul’s book of ‘Farm poems” Breaking Ground won the Washington State Book Award in 2004. If you haven’t read or met Paul Hunter (somehow) it is certainly time you did.
See and Share the Paul Hunter at BookTree Facebook Event Page Here
The Book
Clownery: In lieu of a life spent in harness; is the autobiography of an artist and teacher resembling the author, in prose poetry, with some fictional and hypothetical pieces set off in italics. The clown grows and matures despite the buffeting of an often painful waking
world, though he tumbles and soars in his dreams. The book follows his education, consciousness, work, play, dreams, humor, art, love, relationships, and the mysterious nature of a full life on this fragile planet.
"Hunter’s haunting persona, the Clown, in his new book of linked vignettes, Clownery, In lieu of a life spent in harness, eloquently reminds us of our own foibles and follies, yearnings and disappointments, successes and failures, regrets and satisfactions, as we look back at the way we lived our lives. With great skill, insight, playfulness, and compassion, Hunter dissects the character’s dreams, aspirations, and lifetime dislocation from the place he calls home, the place he returns to again and again in imagination and in reality: the American farmland where his moral character, values, and attachment to the land and its people were formed—the simple things that make a life worth living."
- Phoebe Bosche, managing director, The Raven Chronicles
BIO
For the past 22 years Paul Hunter has published fine letterpress poetry under the imprint of Wood Works, including 26 books and 66 broadsides. His poems have appeared in Alaska Fisherman’s Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bloomsbury Review, Clover, Iowa Review, North American Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Raven Chronicles, The Small Farmer’s Journal, The Southern Review, Spoon River Poetry Review and Windfall, as well as in seven full-length books and three chapbooks.
His first collection of farming poems, Breaking Ground, 2004, from Silverfish Review Press, was reviewed in the New York Times, and received the 2004 Washington State Book Award. A second volume of farming poems, Ripening, was published in 2007, a third companion volume, Come the Harvest, appeared in 2008, and the fourth from the same publisher, Stubble Field, appeared in 2012.
He was recently a featured poet on The News Hour. He also has a prose book on small-scale, sustainable farming, One Seed to Another: The New Small Farming, published in 2010 by the Small Farmer’s Journal. He has taught at the University of Washington, the Overlake School, the Skagit River Poetry Festival, and the Oregon Poetry Society