I volunteered for all this, accidentally,

by raising my hand, intending to ask

a question I couldn’t put into words. 

(“Um,” pg. 55)

Tom C. Hunley wanders the earth like an Old Testament prophet, alternately dazzled and flummoxed by life, struck dumb then granted inspired speech, a bewildered seer in a landscape of mirrors. The poet struggles endlessly in these tragi-comic poems—with his autistic son and wayward daughter, lovers, his soul, the playground of language, the neighbors, God, existence, his students, drugs and booze, rock and roll, and the fact that he doubts he can find the words for what he needs to say, exactly as he removes the burning coal from his tongue to etch with it each dazzling image.

Alternately wrestling un-ironically with God and his demons, as in the initial poem “Dear God, Show Me How To Walk in Wonder” (pg.9), this totally up-front poet admits what sometimes really does cross a father’s mind at birth:

                                 ...I thought, at first,

he looked like a carp, hooked and gasping,

                 and I was struck dumb, as silent as You.

Hunley’s narrator, perpetually caught in the moment when the Big Fisherman dangles baits, the choice of which means the difference between another inevitable mistake or a life-giving chance, remains bewildered—he can’t really tell which bait he eventually takes, but nonetheless faultlessly spins the line to reel out the metaphor:

                                …I don’t understand how

I got here any more than a lobster understands

how it ended up in a tank next to a Please Wait

to be Seated sign, but both of us can read

the faces of the cruelly beautiful women

who point at us.

“Um” (pg. 55)

Poems selected from “The State That Springfield Is In,” (Split Lip Press, 2016), more-or-less backstories for “The Simpsons” cartoon characters, lack the existential frisson of his other poems, but even here his manic cinéma vérité verbal machinery spews unforgettable images and metaphors.  

To quote in a short review only three of these sixty-four poems reprises the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Hunley’s struggles and poems are indelible, his inventiveness endless. Who else has written an entire collection such as Here Lies, based on offing the narrator to see what happens? (Here Lies, SFASU Press, 2018)

I quote the last poem, (pg. 118), from Hunley’s earliest book, Still, There’s a Glimmer (2004, Word Tech Editions) in its entirety, because this poet was on fire right out of the gate:

Intercourse

As we made love, our scars met,

grazing long enough for mine to say

“He tries to hide me,”

and for yours to reply

“I know I embarrass her.”

“He never learned how to swim,” whispered my scar.

“She got picked last in gym class,

then cried in the locker room,” replied yours.

Just then, a huge wound opened in me.

You touched it. It closed.

I was filled, fully healed, and I knew

I would never be able not to love you.

GREG KOSMICKI is a poet and retired social worker who lives in Omaha, Nebraska. He founded The Backwaters Press in 1997, for which he now serves as Editor Emeritus. Greg’s poetry has been published in numerous magazines since 1975, both print and online.