Advance praise for the wryly humorous poetry collection Things Will Get Worse by Peter Junker, to be released by Kudzu Leaf Press on October 10, 2019:
The root meaning of the word “experience” is “out of peril.” In this book Peter Junker conveys experiences so powerful he had to invent a new form of poetry, the hekaton, to contain them. Yet, out of this peril, he leaves us with a heightened sense of how precious our everyday lives really are." —Dan Veach, founding editor of Atlanta Review, author of Lunchboxes
The tightly crafted and sonically rich 10-line, 100-syllable poems in Peter Junker’s marvelous Things Will Get Worse are miracles of compression, both verbal and emotional. A hard-won yet gentle optimism and a steady empathy infuse this collection, not just for the speaker but for all of us who struggle (which is all of us). I’ve been waiting a long time for this book, and Junker has made these poems utterly worth the wait. —Melissa Range, author of Horse and Rider and Scriptorium
If you've ever suffered, you know how grating cheery platitudes can be, no matter how well intentioned. Along comes Peter Junker’s Things Will Get Worse like a bracing antiseptic that somehow becomes a healing balm. The poems’ controlled structure attempts to bring a kind of order to the disorderly experience of living with real mental illness, and their brevity breaks Junker’s message into doses small enough for the reader to take in, almost-but-not-always painlessly. Finish the course and find yourself appreciating just how wide-awake real hope is. —Amy Elise Greene, Director of Spiritual Care, The Cleveland Clinic Center for Ethics, Humanities and Spiritual Care
