Onomatopoeia by Hunter Grey

A reader makes unaccustomed adjustments coming to terms with Onomatopoeia, this wonderful first collection from Hunter Grey, that seem related to the adjustments we might make reading Frank O’Hara or James Tate, et al., which is to say, the stunning reimagining of poetry itself. Grey’s intimate and endlessly surprising work does contain beautifully discrete images like “lead veins in a stained-glass window . . .” But it’s also full of associative dream sequences, as in “still humming off vestigial midnight fairy-circle conspiracies,” for instance. Whatever it is—this folkloric, experiential art of fantasy and memory cast in such unforgettable lyrics—it is a delight.

–Michael White

To read this wonderful book is to be led through a city of oblique alleys and avenues, a maze in which some poems end abruptly in locked gates or empty lots, while others open onto expansive vistas of cosmopolitan experience. Never sure of exactly where we are, the reader grazes one image after another, veering in sympathy with whatever shape-shifting, atmospheric wind prevails. Suffice it to say that there is nothing predictable about this book. Even the individual poems seem different on second and third readings. If you like poetry that consistently surprises, that nudges you time and again into greater awareness, this is the book for you.

–Mark Cox

“A donkey brayed and an apple / fell from the sky.” So begins one of Hunter Grey’s original and fascinating poems. The fact that the poem ends on what one might think of a traditionally realistic setting, one that subtly questions itself (either he or the donkey is humming) attests to the complexity of his vision, a vision the tradition of Simic and Strand. In short, Hunter Grey has created a parallel world that looks askance at our own, or rather sees something different than we do when we look, for this is a word where “Fate shows little interest in where / the signs are pointing,” where “Somebody put something archaic in my denominator” and “the cornerstone saw fit to sprout a flywheel.” You will not see the world the same after reading this terrific book, and that is as it should be, that is as all superb poetry should do. In short, this book marks the birth of a major poetic voice.

–Richard Jackson, author of The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems