THINGS WILL GET WORSE makes POETRY Magazine's May 2020 online reading list!

We’re pleased to have Peter Junker’s Things Will Get Worse among the books selected by poet A. E. Stallings for POETRY Magazine’s May 2020 online reading list:

“The prize for most aptly-titled poetry collection this year surely goes to Peter Junker’s Things Will Get Worse, a group of sturdy little poems in a form he’s dubbed a ‘hekaton.’”

Here’s a sample hekaton (10 lines of 10 syllables) from the book:

Old Mill Town

Up here the roads have more names than signs.
The tame dogs aren’t fenced and the fenced ones
Aren’t collared. Poverty shows itself,
Oddly enough, through accumulations

Of worldly possessions parked in the yard.
In some yards it’s always Christmas and in
A few others it’s always Halloween.
A handful of old Victorians peel

In the weather, contemporaries of
The brick downtown where trains used to stop.

Advance praise for THINGS WILL GET WORSE

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

New Poetry Titles for 2019/2020

Ghosts and Illegals by Lee Passarella

LEE PASSARELLA is a reviewer for Audiophile Audition, an online music magazine, and is a former senior literary editor for Atlanta Review. His poetry has appeared in Chelsea, Cream City Review, Louisville Review, The Formalist, Antietam Review, Journal of the American Medical Association, The Literary Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Cortland Review, and many other publications. His poetry books and chapbooks include Swallowed up in Victory (Burd Street Press, 2002), The Geometry of Loneliness (David Robert Books, 2006), Sight-Reading Schumann (Pudding House, 2007), Redemption (FutureCycle Press, 2014), and Magnetic North (Finishing Line Press, 2016).

From the Attic: Selected Verse (2nd Edition) by Anthony Harrington

ANTHONY HARRINGTON was born and raised in Philadelphia where he received a degree in Philosophy from St. Charles Seminary. He has made his home in the Atlanta area for the last four decades. His verse has appeared in Midwest Poetry Review, The Classical Outlook, Western Humanities Review, Light, The Saturday Review, and other magazines. Examples of his verse have been used in textbooks by Robert Wallace and Miller Williams as well as in The Random House Treasury of Light Verse. His poetry volumes include Tersery Versery (Hendricks Publishing, 1982), The Man in the Goodwill Bin (Tinhorn Press, 1987), and From the Attic: Selected Verse, 1965-2015 (Kudzu Editions, 2015).

Things Will Get Worse by Peter Junker

PETER JUNKER was born in Akron, Ohio in 1962 and grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. He studied Hellenistic religions 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 as an editor for museum publications at The Art Institute of Chicago, he had a career in nonprofit development and corporate communications. He lives in Atlanta with his wife, Julie Cannon, a psychotherapist and wellness coach. His poetry chapbook Lunacy, It’s Called was published by Kudzu Leaf Press in 2017. His first full-length collection of poetry, Things Will Get Worse, will be released in the fall of 2019 by Kudzu Leaf Press. It will include all of the poems in his chapbook Lunacy, It’s Called.