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.�
Author Biography:
Jeff Gundy, long-time professor of English at Bluffton University, has published six earlier books of poems and four of prose, most recently Somewhere Near Defiance (Anhinga, 2014), Songs from an Empty Cage: Poetry, Mystery, Anabaptism, and Peace (Cascadia, 2013), and Spoken Among the Trees (Akron, 2008). His earlier Bottom Dog books include Rhapsody with Dark Matter (2000) and Inquiries (1992).
A 2008 Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Salzburg, he taught at LCC International University in Klaipeda, Lithuania in spring 2015. He plays 6- and 12-string guitar, and puts in as many miles as possible on his road bike and (with his wife Marlyce) on their Cannondale tandem.
His poems and essays have appeared in Georgia Review, The Sun, Image, Kenyon Review, Christian Century, Mennonite Quarterly Review, Conrad Grebel Review, Nimrod, and many other magazines Other honors and awards include multiple Ohio Arts Council fellowships, two C. Henry Smith Peace Lectureships, Bechtel and Yoder Lectureships, a Nancy Dasher Award, a Society of Midland Authors Poetry Award, and the 2015 Simons Lectures at Bethel (KS) College.
