Jeff Gundy, long-time professor of English at Bluffton University,
has published six earlier books of poems and four of prose, most
recently Somewhere Near Defiance (Anhinga, 2014), Songs from an
Empty Cage: Poetry, Mystery, Anabaptism, and Peace (Cascadia,
2013), and Spoken Among the Trees (Akron, 2008). His earlier Bottom
Dog books include Rhapsody with Dark Matter (2000) and Inquiries
(1992).
A 2008 Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Salzburg, he taught
at LCC International University in Klaipeda, Lithuania in spring
2015. He plays 6- and 12-string guitar, and puts in as many miles
as possible on his road bike and (with his wife Marlyce) on their
Cannondale tandem.
His poems and essays have appeared in Georgia Review, The Sun,
Image, Kenyon Review, Christian Century, Mennonite Quarterly
Review, Conrad Grebel Review, Nimrod, and many other magazines
Other honors and awards include multiple Ohio Arts Council
fellowships, two C. Henry Smith Peace Lectureships, Bechtel and
Yoder Lectureships, a Nancy Dasher Award, a Society of Midland
Authors Poetry Award, and the 2015 Simons Lectures at Bethel (KS)
College.
If Whitman were born in the Midwest to Mennonite parents, listened to Dylan and the Dead and loved to laugh at himself, he�d sound just like Jeff Gundy. �I want the reader as far inside of my skin as possible,� he writes, in bemused poems that are in love with the productions of matter and time. �How else to describe this absurd, lovely world?� he poses in the title poem of his warm and inviting Abandoned Homeland. Gundy�s poetry reminds us, over and over, that paying attention to the delights and troubles of existence becomes a kind of psalm to this botched and beautiful creation. Philip Metres, author of Sand Opera
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