Poetry. In her first collection of poetry, Emily Hunt inverts the ordinary: How to bring a new figure close / was like taking a globe, turning it once / and placing it back on its pedestal. Using spare diction and imagery, Hunt imagines a new world so close to what the world is like that the reader might feel like a humble visitor to our planet Earth. Though often elegiac, DARK GREEN is alive, inviting its readers to deeply sense this poet's tender and singular investigations. With incantatory wit, Emily Hunt writes poems that could be stories, or stories that might be poems. DARK GREEN starts with a farewell, but grows in power, depth and range from page to page; like snowflakes or violins, no two poems are the same, but each displays visual acuity married to a gift from a different fairy, the power to reveal under the reader's skin vast pools of hitherto untapped emotion. Reading Emily Hunt's DARK GREEN one feels things one couldn't have before imagined possible.--Kevin Killian Like Auden's, Emily Hunt's precision and bold intelligence discover what ought to be discovered on a daily basis; her poems say what suffering is and what it does; they say we are all of us in all we do. From DARK GREEN we get a hint at how to register the almost invisible nuances that fuel our spirits, minds and heart.--Dara Wier Emily Hunt is an accomplished lyricist, quiet ethnographer, and kooky observer of inner turbulences. She's also a remarkable poet who has written a stunning first book. Her poems are spiky, wheeling, and fierce; a voice continuously evolving, speaking directly from her own haunted yet intimate, 2000-now. DARK GREEN is a wonder and a gift.--Peter Gizzi
