Raw Eggs

"It's hard to mosh when your hips hurt," Patrick Julian Hunter tells us in his wry and unflinching debut collection. These are the confessions, resolutions, exultations, and objections of an aging Gen-Xer. The poems in Raw Eggs vacillate between punk rock and smooth jazz, revolution and tradition, smoke screens and startling intimacy, playful allegory and shrewd realism. The characters in these poems are visited by moss mermaids, ancient gods, and portals to the otherworlds of their memories. Poetry itself is a ghostly, cherubic presence that inspires and guides the poet's hand, dancing in the liminal space between acquiescence and audacity.

In the plainspoken language of a natural storyteller, Hunter spotlights the bizarre human pageantry of office birthday parties and social media, extols a multicoloured pinch of pocket lint that stirs up old memories and new spiritual revelations, and celebrates the closeness of two old friends cheerfully eating each other's bloody severed hands in hoagie sandwiches.

From childhood nostalgia to domestic pleasures, climate anxiety and anti-consumerism to senescent woes, Raw Eggs is an all-you-can-eat buffet, serving up modern specialties like sunbaked seafood with a side of snark-proving that you can make absolutely anything from the raw material of your life.