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9781947504134

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How can we put the eroded/loaded world back into language? Jeff Gundy asks in his splendid new book Without a Plea. His answer, in poem after adventurous poem, is that the world is full/of little possibilities for love if one stays in conversation with everyone and everything from Bob Dylan to the Book of Job, from grouchy geese to the sweet tangle of sound from his own guitar. Impish, probing, and expansive, Gundy's poems reward the mind and replenish the spirit, speaking truth in the most human way. --Lynn Powell, author of Season of the Second Thought

How can we put the eroded/loaded world back into language? Jeff Gundy asks in his splendid new book Without a Plea. His answer, in poem after adventurous poem, is that the world is full/of little possibilities for love if one stays in conversation with everyone and everything--from Bob Dylan to the Book of Job, from grouchy geese to the sweet tangle of sound from his own guitar. Impish, probing, and expansive, Gundy's poems reward the mind and replenish the spirit, speaking truth in the most human way. --Lynn Powell, author of Season of the Second Thought

Jeff Gundy's Without a Plea is both taut and sprawling, brashly ranging from stick-thin lyrics to page-crossing two-line stanzas (his favored formal device), to prose-based explorations of subjects as disparate as mud and gravel, a red shed, and the condition of rural America. Gundy wears his intellect lightly, but he does wear it to contemplate the interwoven realms of religion, history, society, and family: Everything is connected but not even the wind harp can say exactly how. // To build soil from dust and ashes. // To argue with god and the world as it is. // To notice the groundhog, and let it be. We are in great need, and I expect are going to be in much greater need, of such hardnosed gentleness. Stephen Corey, author of Startled at the Big Sound: Essays Personal, Literary, and Cultural

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Jeff Gundy's seventh book of poems, Abandoned Homeland (Bottom Dog, 2015) was a finalist for the Ohioana Poetry Award, and he was named Ohio Poet of the Year for Somewhere Near Defiance (Anhinga, 2014). His earlier books with Bottom Dog include Rhapsody with Dark Matter (2002) and Inquiries (1992). Songs from an Empty Cage: Poetry, Mystery, Anabaptism, and Peace (Cascadia, 2013), and Walker in the Fog: On Mennonite Writing (Cascadia, 2005), winner of the Dale Brown award, are the most recent of his four prose books. His poems and essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Sun, Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, Christian Century, Image, and many other journals. Other grants and lectureships include multiple Ohio Arts Council grants and Pushcart nominations and two C. Henry Smith Peace Lectureships. Gundy is professor of English at Bluffton University in Ohio and director of the Bluffton University Research Center, and spent his last two sabbaticals teaching at LCC International University in Klaipeda, Lithuania (2015) and as a Fulbright lecturer and poet in residence at the University of Salzburg, Austria (2008). He and his wife Marlyce have three grown sons, five grandchildren, four granddogs, and have logged several thousand miles on their bright yellow Cannondale tandem.

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