Still, There's a Glimmer, Poems by Tom C. Hunley

Tom C. Hunley writes poetry with abundance: an abundance of humor, an abundance of compassion, and an abundance of grace. He excludes very little of the world in his poetry. The unusually wide range of subject matter, styles and tones in his second collection, Still, There’s a Glimmer, are nonetheless bound by the unusually wide skill of Hunley as a poet.

Sample Poems by Tom C. Hunley

Tom C. Hunley is the husband of Ralaina Ruvalcaba and the father of Evan Joel Ruvalcaba Hunley. He has degrees from Highline Community College (AA), University of Washington (BA), Eastern Washington University (MFA) and Florida State University (Ph.D.), where he was the recipient of a 2002-2003 Kingsbury Fellowship. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Western Kentucky University. Before settling on a career in academia, he worked as a public relations writer, a sportswriter, a technical writer, a warehouseman, a Salvation Army bellringer, an enumerator for the U.S. Census Bureau, a typist, a data entry clerk, a file clerk, a fry cook, a cashier, a dishwasher, night manager of a convenience store, and a canopy construction worker. He is the editor/publisher of Steel Toe Books.

“It’s strange to be getting toward 50 and never having read a poet who spoke to my experience. Tom Hunley does this. I felt that I was on the same wavelength with him, but that maybe he was more on the same wavelength with me than I am. What I love so much in these poems is the concession of defeat. It’s so un-American. We’re always after trophies of some kind or another. This is a different register in poetry, and one that actually moved me.”—Kirby Olson

“Tom Hunley’s poems are dromedaries of droll nobility. They move with a sureness and sincerity that grants the occasion of their making with a sense of journey, the cadence of an animal called poetry capable of carrying us anywhere.”—John Olson

“Tom Hunley’s poems give up the world in all its glorious profusion—babies nursing, first kisses, scars, the King James Bible, girls in t-shirts, Joan of Arc, bikinis, Doritos, poetry readings, fist fights, shoot-outs at a 7-11, lost fathers, televangelists, Kinko’s, and every poet’s nemesis—rejection letters. These poems are witty and wry and send arrows into the deep unconscious body that informs our waking dreams. In Hunley’s world Curiosity chats with Apathy, Confusion dithers with Amusement, Loneliness complains to Sadness, and Envy envies Fear and they all answer back in spades. These are shout-out-loud poems, poems that make you dizzy with language and lightning storms that erupt off the page.”—Barbara Hamby

ISBN 1932339523, 96 pages, $17.00

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