Kudzu Leaf Press

10/11/2022

Kudzu Leaf Press updated their address.

Kudzu Leaf Press updated their address.

10/11/2022

Happy hekaton day! Celebrate by reading one of Peter Junker's hekatons (ten lines of ten syllables each), such as "Advice for Eve and Adam" from his 2019 collection from Kudzu Leaf Pres, THINGS WILL GET WORSE.

09/10/2021

From the Attic: Selected Verse, 1965-2015

Happy birthday to our author Anthony Harrington! https://www.amazon.com/Attic-Selected-Verse-1965-2015/dp/0996349219/

From the Attic: Selected Verse, 1965-2015

05/31/2020

Reading List: May 2020 by Holly Amos | Poetry Foundation

We’re pleased to have Peter Junker’s Things Will Get Worse among the books selected by poet A. E. Stallings for POETRY Magazine’s May 2020 online reading list: “The prize for most aptly-titled poetry collection this year surely goes to Peter Junker’s Things Will Get Worse, a group of sturdy little poems in a form he’s dubbed a ‘hekaton.’” Here’s a sample hekaton (10 lines of 10 syllables) from the book:

Old Mill Town

Up here the roads have more names than signs.
The tame dogs aren’t fenced and the fenced ones
Aren’t collared. Poverty shows itself,
Oddly enough, through accumulations

Of worldly possessions parked in the yard.
In some yards it’s always Christmas and in
A few others it’s always Halloween.
A handful of old Victorians peel

In the weather, contemporaries of
The brick downtown where trains used to stop.

The Reading List is a feature of Poetry’s Editors’ Blog. This month, contributors to the May 2020 issue share some recommendations. Desirée Alvarez Geometry of Shadows, Giorgio de Chirico, translated by Stefania Heim Jo Sarzotti, Waiting for Achilles Jennifer Hasegawa, La...

03/04/2020

56th Annual Georgia Author of the Year Awards Nominees – Georgia Author of the Year Awards

Peter Junker is among the nominees for Georgia Author of the Year for a full-length poetry collection for "Things Will Get Worse," published by Kudzu Leaf Press last year. Please wish him good luck by counting to 10 ten times! https://www.authoroftheyear.org/news/56th-annual-georgia-author-of-the-year-awards-nominees/?fbclid=IwAR25tR21y-_TkK6BDPAwT_Yi0HdywIyVLmBDfO-DfoTX_ZO1INQXJP_nlqA

56th Annual Georgia Author of the Year Awards NomineesNews / By Jenny Sadre-Orafai Congratulations to all of the 2020 Georgia Author of the Year Awards nominees. BIOGRAPHY David Cady, Religion of Fear: The True Story of the Church of God of the Union Assembly Tom Chaffin, Revolutionary Brothers: Tho...

10/30/2019

Kudzu Leaf Press is proud to see two new poems by our author Peter Junker prominently featured in the English-language Indian magazine "CultureCult."

10/11/2019

The hekatons are here! "Things Will Get Worse," Peter Junker's collection of poems in a form he invented called the hekaton (10 lines of 10 syllables each) has been released today, 10/10. The book is currently available exclusively through the Kudzu Leaf Press website (www.kudzuleafpress.com), with free shipping, ahead of its Amazon listing. The e-book format will be available on several platforms later this month.

09/16/2019

Maybe things aren't as bad as they seem

Facebook post by Peter Martin Junker on Sept 16, 2019: " 'Things could be worse' mugs. Great for enjoying a cup of joe when you read my book 'Things Will Get Worse' (official publication date 10/10)." You can read more about Peter Junker and his soon-to-be-released poetry volume "Things Will Get Worse" on the ABOUT page of the Kudzu Leaf Press website: https://www.kudzuleafpress.com/about

You could be pestered by UFOs, harassed by robots, or inconvenienced by voracious carnivores. Treat yourself to a set of these beautiful porcelain mugs— a reminder that maybe things could be even worse.

07/28/2019

Advance praise for the wryly humorous poetry collection THINGS WILL GET WORSE by Peter Junker, to be released by Kudzu Leaf Press in September 2019:

The root meaning of the word “experience” is “out of peril.” In this book Peter Junker conveys experiences so powerful he had to invent a new form of poetry to contain them. Yet, out of this peril, he leaves us with a heightened sense of how precious our everyday lives really are. —Dan Veach, founding editor of ATLANTA REVIEW, author of LUNCHBOXES

The tightly crafted and sonically rich 10-line, 100-syllable poems in Peter Junker’s marvelous THINGS WILL GET WORSE are miracles of compression, both verbal and emotional. A hard-won yet gentle optimism and a steady empathy infuse this collection, not just for the speaker but for all of us who struggle (which is all of us). I’ve been waiting a long time for this book, and Junker has made these poems utterly worth the wait. —Melissa Range, author of HORSE AND RIDER and SCRIPTORIUM

If you've ever suffered, you know how grating cheery platitudes can be, no matter how well intentioned. Along comes Peter Junker’s THINGS WILL GET WORSE like a bracing antiseptic that somehow becomes a healing balm. The poems’ controlled structure attempts to bring a kind of order to the disorderly experience of living with real mental illness, and their brevity breaks Junker’s message into doses small enough for the reader to take in, almost-but-not-always painlessly. Finish the course and find yourself appreciating just how wide-awake real hope is. —Amy Elise Greene, Director of Spiritual Care, The Cleveland Clinic Center for Ethics, Humanities and Spiritual Care

06/10/2019

Click here to support Help Tony and Natalie with cancer medical expenses organized by Ruth Windham

Please consider helping out one of our authors, Anthony Harrington, with his medical expenses. He is being treated for bladder cancer and liver cancer, and on top of that his wife was recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer and will be undergoing surgery for that. You can read more about Tony and his book FROM THE ATTIC: SELECTED VERSE, 1965-2015 on the ABOUT page of our website.

(photo of Anthony Harrington on a bench with a statue of Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh on the Grand Canal in Dublin - the site of Kavanagh's poem "Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin") ORIGINAL CAMPAIGN STORY (FEBRUARY 2019): This online fundraising campaign has been set up for fami...

11/30/2017

Peter Junker's limited-edition poetry chapbook "Lunacy, It's Called" is now available for sale directly from our website, with free shippping within the United States. Poet Melissa Range called Junker’s signature 10-line, 100-syllable poems “miracles of compression, both verbal and emotional.” Amy Greene said of his poetry, “The poems’ controlled structure attempts to bring a kind of order to the disorderly experience of living with mental illness, and their brevity breaks Junker’s message into doses small enough for the reader to take in, almost-but-not-always painlessly.”

07/09/2017

Janus Head/Peter Junker

Here are a few poems by Peter Junker published by JANUS HEAD in their Spring 1999 issue: "Be With Me," "Muse," and "On Pine Mountain in Late Summer." (See previous post regarding the release of his poetry collection BEFORE THE NEXT FROST by Kudzu Leaf Press this fall.)

at one hour before sunrise in the heart of Tokyo, in the hotel where radio snooze alarms offer birdsong for those guests whose memories of countryside linger. Be with me on that low bed I recall as lonely at dusk, when the radio offered crickets and owlsong for my soul, a restless foreigner there on...

07/09/2017

Peter Junker's first full-length poetry collection, BEFORE THE NEXT FROST, will be released by Kudzu Leaf Press this fall, and available for sale through the Kudzu Leaf Press website (currently under renovation) as well as through Amazon. Peter Junker received an MFA from the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he served as assistant editor for poetry at THE IOWA REVIEW. After working as an editor for museum publications at The Art Institute of Chicago, he cobbled together a career in nonprofit development and corporate communications. He lives in Atlanta with his wife, Julie Cannon, a psychotherapist and wellness coach. (Below is an image from the cover of the book: "Dogwood," C.C. 01.0, Public Domain.)

08/29/2016

We didn't know, until this Georgia Native Plant Society post, that kudzu blooms have a fragrance not unlike Nehi grape soda.

Although we are all about Georgia's native plants, sometimes we post information about non-native plants that you might find. Blooming now is kudzu (Pueraria montana), a vigorous vine native to Asia. Kudzu was first introduced to the United States in 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia as an ornamental. It was also later promoted as a forage plant in the US.

The purple flowers have a grape soda smell and are generally a bit obscured by the leaves (you might smell them before you see them).

08/19/2016

The address for the new SquareSpace website for Kudzu Leaf Press (formerly Kudzu Editions) is www.kudzuleafpress.com. The domain name and website were secured yesterday. At the moment there's little content other than a profile photo. Please check back soon!

08/19/2016

Our Kudzu Editions page will be kept active for a while as we get the word out about the name change to Kudzu Leaf Press.