The Book of Funnels

By Christian Hawkey

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• This book marks the debut of a startling new voice that restlessly transforms self and surroundings in every poem.
  
  Weathers, objects and possibilities blow through these visionary and synesthetic poems, sometimes with aplomb, sometimes with trepidation, often with humor, but always with a startled and startling wonder. Hawkey’s poems search for the edge of intimacy in a world of multiplicity, looking for a relation that will hold as they “negotiate/a stream of particles/without end, except here/A face across from me,/the red warmth of soft breathing.”
  
  Winner of the 2006 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
  
  SOLD OUT

• For Hawkey, language is a strange tool, like a machine that begins to sweat and then turns beautiful. And if there is something unshakeable in this book, it is the poet’s tremendously careful and necessary obliteration of how we expect language to work... His poetry seems to whisper loudly into your face, to pluck at your ribs, to move you into a huge people-sized aquarium and, once you’re acquainted with your fellow inhabitants, to fill with breathable green water through which you will see and feel everything from now on.
  Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Cranky
  
  Simultaneously funny and eerie, Hawkey evokes feelings of giddy anticipation and anxious foreboding, as typified by “Green Solitude” which begins: “No such thing as exit for the man lost / In the middle of a cornfield. / No such thing as field,” and which ends, “the sound / Of his listening was the landscape / Advancing at his approach.” Like the best possible vacation or voyage, The Book of Funnels appeals to the reader as explorer, presenting the promise of surprise and discovery.
  Kathleen Rooney, Boston Review
  
  Hawkey’s writing is an organic, self-generated process: intriguing and original; but also good humoured and open enough to invite you in for further reflection.
  Sarah Law, Stride Magazine
  
  There is a sense in The Book of Funnels that Hawkey is trying to hand over to the reader all things altogether at once, as if the world were an object made of infinite facets that have to been seen simultaneously to be understood.
  Stephen Allen, Rattle
  
  As readers, we trust ourselves to the speaker’s listening trance; we hold fast to him, braced for the moment of encounter with the equally powerful landscape, the moment of mutual advance.
  Emily Perez, Gulf Coast

• Christian Hawkey is the author of Petitions for an Alien Relative (a chapbook, hand held editions, 2010), Ventrakl (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), Citizen Of (Wave Books, 2007), Hour, Hour, a chapbook which includes drawings by the artist Ryan Mrowzowski (Delirium Press, 2006), and The Book of Funnels (Verse Press, 2004), winner of the 2006 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. In 2006 he was given a Creative Capital Innovative Literature Award and he has also received awards from the Poetry Fund and the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.