Journey to the Corrida: Poems

In Journey to the Corrida, his ninth book of poems, we see again the unmistakable Junkins poise and persistence in pursuit of suppressed connections, hidden emotions, and runaway home truths. Stylistic brilliance enables him to capture the slow accretion, the sudden jolt, the sheer thrill of the mind grasping what is simultaneously happening within and outside itself. Poems that begin as benign or quirky intimations in a real landscape he sees through to some haunting destinations, always mindful of his own newly-minted proverb: ‘In dreams the dead talk / straight to the heart.’ Junkins’s Corrida is a gutsy and elegant performance. May the judges award it two ears and a tail. -Robert Bagg Ole! and both ears to Don for his book! -Barnaby Conrad

Donald Junkins is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Late at Night in the Rowboat. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grants for his poems and directed the graduate writing program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for ten years. Junkins currently lives and writes in Deerfield, Massachusetts.