Poetry was my first love.
Poetry to me was dream speak. Where you have the freedom to say what you are thinking, without the burden of explanation. Where a dream could become a memory could become a poem could become a spell. You could haunt people with words. The ghost of a moment lingering long past the reality.
I fell in love with that blurry vision at a young age, and found there the truth I so longed for. I read Plath and felt like I was home. I devoured Sexton, Snodgrass, Whitman, Dickinson, Poe, Shelley, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Sappho like they all had something to teach me about the strangeness of being alive.
So, despite the disapproving looks my childhood English teachers lavished on me during our ‘creative writing’ lessons— I have always written poetry. Terrible teenage confessionals, petty depressives, half-remembered nostalgia.
Poetry must be bad, at first.
So must everything, if I’m being honest. If you mean to be good at anything you must first be terrible, accept that you are terrible, and keep going anyway.
Yes, my early poetry was bad. But it was honest. And if I didn’t learn how to be honest through those trite confessionals first, I wouldn’t have written a face full of flowers.
I am equal parts horrified and proud to announce that Bottlecap Press has published my debut poetry chapbook, a face full of flowers, which spans poems from the past ten years.
I’ve included 19 poems, under the themes of ROOTS, FEVER, and BLOOD, which explore motifs of detachment, manic obsession, and renewal of spirit. These poems are my tiny offerings, fragments of truth. The dregs of a dream you just woke up from.
This is my first work to be published in print, and it brings me so much joy that these poems are made tangible by sacred ink and paper. I’ve been criticized for my romanticism, but I will forever support the flesh and blood / paper and ink of printed books.
As a final note: to claim oneself as a poet in the current state of society feels anachronistic at best, and like the butt of someone’s starving artist joke at worst. But I think even with the current state of the world, despite it even, we owe it to ourselves to pursue art.
We deserve a world with poetry, both great and terrible, and I’m very lucky to be able to make my own small contribution.
Oh, What a world—SMH
a face full of flowers
This 36-page collection features 19 poems that explore grief, inheritance, myth, and the uncomfortable beauty of decay. Fusing confessional voice with surreal imagery, a face full of flowers maps emotional wreckage with a sharp, intimate edge.
Bottlecap Press, based in Los Angeles, is known for championing bold new voices in contemporary poetry. Hund joins a growing roster of emerging authors whose work is reshaping the boundaries of small press literature.
The chapbook is available for purchase online in both print and digital formats.
