STRANGER
The Song Cave, 2024
Stranger, Emily Hunt's long-awaited follow-up to her acclaimed debut collection of poems, intimately chronicles the effects of love, labor, and grief on the life and sensibility of an artist. These poems shed a shifting light on the peculiar textures of our era. Hunt treads with concision, vigor, and excitement, addressing directly lived experiences––from the mundane to the profound. Whether it’s her curious interactions with dating apps, 19th century political speeches, dizzying corporate communication, or emails from her schizophrenic brother, the exact details and use of language in these poems become almost elemental, making an urgent record of the present. Stranger blurs the boundary between life and art—“The things that happened / bled into the language we exchanged.”—with the crystalline touch and nuance of a truly gifted writer.
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"In Stranger, the gorgeous follow-up to her first collection Dark Green, Emily Hunt betrays a Schuyler-esque commitment to dailiness. To all of it: to memory and the great infinite void of the present moment, to that which wounds us and that which nurtures us, to agony and boredom and sweetness, equally to the blooming life of flowers and the “bad bloom” of waged work. These poems are electric with pleasure." –Sara Nicholson
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REVIEWS:
The Best Books of 2024 (So Far), Vulture
“A funny and surprising interaction with dailiness, including our phones — the hardware and the relationships maintained through them — and whatever else is still tactile.” —Maddie Crum
The New York Times Book Review, March 2024
“Hunt’s second collection shows a fascination with the different forms language takes depending on context, from the corporate to the confessional to the greeting card.”
COMPANY
Poetry chapbook
The Song Cave, 2019
"The work of Emily Hunt, with its sonic brilliance grounded by its precise sense of affect, offers a gorgeous reminder that poetry is most itself when it conveys what no other medium could. The gestalt of each poem leaves me astounded. At the level of the line, her poems instigate this uncanny, unpredictable rhythm. Open to the surprise of the observable image, her work reconfigures the way in which I read the given world." —Henk Rossouw, Tupelo Quarterly
DARK GREEN
The Song Cave, 2015
“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
“Reading Emily Hunt’s Dark Green one feels things one couldn’t have before imagined possible.” –Kevin Killian
“Emily Hunt’s precision and bold intelligence discover what ought to be discovered on a daily basis . . . From Dark Green we get a hint at how to register the almost invisible nuances that fuel our spirits, minds, and hearts.” –Dara Wier
"This relationship between reality and surreality, between inner and outer worlds, is also the proving ground where the poet must find a way to live in the one world she's been given; in Hunt's work that struggle is beautiful, funny, painterly, and terrifying." –Publishers Weekly
"The complexity of these poems' precision, itself a simple machine, is what's spectacular about them." —Davy Knittle, American Microreviews
“Much of what there is to love about rhythm is beautifully showcased in Emily Hunt's poetry: its capacity to hold together a poem that's conducted by intuition and association, the way it induces a soft and especially welcome hypnosis, and its ancient power to distinguish poetry from other, more soluble kinds of language use. I've read these astonishing poems, particularly ‘Figure the Color of the Wave She Watched,’ with tremendous admiration, swells of feeling, and over and over again.” - Timothy Donnelly, citation for 2012 Iowa Review Poetry Prize
"vibrant and arresting . . . with the guileful objectivity of Lydia Davis and the empirical radiance of Basho . . ." —JoAnna Novak, Diagram
"Hunt’s poems don’t shy away from the kind of cosmic attention I’m concerned with even as they find, somehow, like a piece of hay in a haystack, the beating heart of the self in all of space and time." —Seth Landman, Weird Sister
"Hunt is a technician of the line and of white space . . . The poems in Dark Green reproduce what it means to exist in Dickinson's 'condensed presence'." —Colorado Review
Purchase:
Reviews and Features:
30 Must-Read Poetry Debuts from 2015
Poetry Society of America: In Their Own Words
Little Reviews for Busy People
The Poetry Foundation's 2015 Staff Book Picks
The Best Poetry Collections of 2015 at Lit Hub
COUSINS
Cold Cube Press, 2019
Email me at emilyrhunt [at] gmail.com to purchase.
40 pages
4 color risograph
2019
Cousins is a collection of photo-couplets by New York based poet Emily Hunt. Each spread contains two photos in conversation with each other—brief glimpses from walks and commutes in New York, San Francisco, Oakland, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Providence. Printed in two different palettes, this book exists in the liminal space between poetry chapbook and photo essay.
THIS ALWAYS HAPPENS
Brave Men Press, 2013
A book of drawings and captions.
Email me at emilyrhunt [at] gmail.com to learn more or purchase a copy.