Ohio Poet of the Year--2015
Reading Abandoned Homeland, Jeff Gundy's new collection, left me with awe and envy. Such exquisite lines about belief, desire, small-town life, grief, grace, mercy, failure, and faith. As the collection's title poem claims, we may all indeed be exiles on a mutilated, imperfect planet, but it's a world where, paradoxically, "We'll sing/and sway, praise each other and walk back in the dark/holding hands. Then we'll gather what we need and head/off again, for good." Another poem asks, "How will you spend your small, strange, unrepeatable life?" I've spent some of mine living in these poems, so worth every minute. Kate Fox, former editor of Ohioana Quarterly
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Michael Martone writes: "In the elegant and graceful meditations of Abandoned Homeland, Jeff Gundy pilots the levitational lyric like an ace. He demonstrates that it is still available to us, weightless even while embedded, as it is here, in the raw catastrophe of our basest histories. I am so drawn to the thickets of these long-lined couplets, breeched by the burble of percolating song. I am taken with the poems' shape, the checkerboard graphic of the Midwestern landscape."