PETER JUNKER was born in Akron, Ohio in 1962 and grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. He studied religion and philosophy at Arizona State, and received an MFA from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he served as assistant editor for poetry at The Iowa Review. After working in museum publications at The Art Institute of Chicago, he made a career in nonprofit development and corporate communications in Atlanta, where he lives with his wife, Julie Cannon, a psychotherapist and wellness coach. His poems have appeared in Blue Mountain Review, Janus Head, Mars Hill Review, Calamaro and James Dickey Review.
Lunacy, It’s Called (limited-edition, staple-bound, 28-page chapbook) by Peter Junker, 2017, $10.00. Poet Melissa Range called Junker’s signature 10-line, 100-syllable poems “miracles of compression, both verbal and emotional.” Amy Greene said of his poetry, “The poems’ controlled structure attempts to bring a kind of order to the disorderly experience of living with mental illness, and their brevity breaks Junker’s message into doses small enough for the reader to take in, almost-but-not-always painlessly.”
His first full-length collection of poetry, Things Will Get Worse, was published in October 2019 by Kudzu Leaf Press. All of the poems in his chapbook Lunacy, It’s Called are included in the full-length collection. Every poem in Things Will Get Worse is in the 10-line, 100-syllable poetic form he calls the hekaton, his own invention. We are pleased and honored to be able to include this blurb from Dan Veach (founding editor of Atlanta Review, and author of the poetry collections Elephant Water and Lunchboxes) on the back cover: “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."
