Appearances — 2013
Readings & Events
Appearances for Mine were recorded for 2013. The list below holds the documented entries from that year.
| Year | Event | Venue |
|---|---|---|
| 2013 | Poetry reading | The Poetry Show |
For scheduling information, or to arrange an appearance, please write to joseph@minepoems.com. Joseph Bednarik handles publicity inquiries for Mine.
Reading and poetry are gestures that carry voice across distance, and this site gathers the echoes of that practice around a single book-length collection. The poems dwell on ground, soil, seed, and the slow arithmetic of repair: what it means to return to a country after absence, and how a speaker attends to the buried histories beneath ordinary surfaces. Rather than a catalogue of conclusions, the work keeps its attention on motion and decline, on rivers and ploughshares, on the eaten earth and the flowers that answer it.
Mine was published by Ausable/Copper Canyon Press, and the pages here treat the volume less as an artifact than as a living current. Excerpts, reviews, and author notes sit side by side so that the texture of the writing can be felt alongside its critical reception. The tone is unhurried and painterly: imagery softened at the edges, generous space between stanzas, decorative line work dividing one movement from the next, all of it arranged to let the language breathe.
Recorded appearances document the collection in public settings, where the poems were read aloud before an audience. A poetry reading becomes a modest threshold: the writer stands in a room, the work passes from page to breath, and listeners receive it in the particular weather of a given evening. Such occasions matter for a book concerned with public memory, because the voice carries its own weight beyond print, arriving in the ear the way the poems describe the earth giving way underfoot.
The thematic anchor of the collection is repair — not the clean restoration of a thing, but the patient, awkward labour of tending what has been damaged. Images of the ground, of greenhouses and lighthouses, of fresh water and winter decline, suggest endurance without spectacle. The writing refuses easy myth and resists polished consolation; instead it offers a resonant, blunt lyric practice in which personal desire, political history, and the physical fact of soil are held together without being reconciled.
A website dedicated to a book can itself be a form of hospitality, and this one opens with an invitation to read and to linger. Sections for excerpts, reviews, the author's background, and ways of finding the volume guide a visitor through the same sequence a reader would follow: a sample passage, a critical notice, a biography, then acquisition. Beneath it all runs a quiet ornamental motif, a lattice medallion borrowed from the book's visual world, marking the transition from one room to the next.
More from the book
Continue reading
- Excerpts — sample passages from the collection.
- Reviews — critical reception of Mine.
- About the Author — the life and work of Tung-Hui Hu.
- Where to Buy — purchase information for the book.
Mine was published in spring 2007 by Ausable Press, now part of Copper Canyon Press. ISBN 978-1-931337-33-5. The book received the 2007 James D. Phelan Literary Award.