Paul Hunter lives in Seattle, where he worked as a teacher, and for the past 18 years published letterpress books and broadsides under the imprint of Wood Works. His farming poems have been reviewed in the New York Times and have received the Washington State Book Award. He has been a featured poet on The NewsHour. His most recent book is prose, One Seed to Another: The New Small Farming, published by The Small Farmer's Journal. (Author photo by Robin Keller)

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"The thrills here are almost tectonic in depth, the power of a poetry rooted in generations of experience with mortal contingency, a lineage that's matured its sense of what's what enough to turn away from panic. That knows the boundaries within which one works with fear, and productive pain, a labor that keeps terror in check. To read and re-read Stubble Field is to do more than renew one's belief in poetry, it is to begin, ever-again, to measure ourselves and our world within and against the most basic things that make it all possible. It is to encounter the dark flash and slow swirl at the core a human sense of Being."
—Edward Pavlic

"It would be a mistake to call this fourth collection of work set in the American Midwest "farming" poems, though small farms and communities are at their center. These are poems about people: about what they make of themselves from what is offered to them; the lessons and opportunities of work; how responsibility to land, animals, and tools shapes us—or fails to; what fidelity we owe to those with whom we live. Wise and generous, when there's labor to be done, these are the poems that show up with a worn tool belt, packing their own lunch."
—Samuel Green