Forthcoming Spring 2006: Drift of the Hunt by Craig Paulenich

Drift of the Hunt, and its central personae the Goat-Man, grows from mixed soil:  the Appalachian foothills of South Carolina and Georgia; Shamanism and Shinto; Eastern European folk tales; the foundries and steel mills of Western PA; the belief that there is a very fine line between humor and horror; and Gary Snyder’s admonition that the poet should have one foot in the Paleolithic and one in the present.

Selections from Drift of the Hunt

At Home
Working the Long Shift
Away the Blood

Craig Paulenich was born in 1953, and raised in Western Pennsylvania.  He has worked in a foundry, on a township road crew, and resurfaced tennis courts, was tax assessor, night watchman, and high school English teacher.  In 1982 he received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh, and in 1989, a Ph.D. in English from Bowling Green State University.  He has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Clemson University, Bowling Green State University, and was Visiting Professor of English at Shimane University, Matsue, Japan.  He is presently Associate Professor of English at Kent State University and Acting Kent Coordinator for the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, a unique consortium with faculty drawn from the University of Akron, Cleveland State University, Kent State University, and Youngstown State University. 

He is editor (with Kent Johnson) of Beneath A Single Moon:  Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry (Shambhala Press, Boston, 1991), and his poetry has appeared in the South Carolina Review, The Georgia Review, Tar River Poetry, Kansas Quarterly, the Minnesota Review, The Hiram Review, Cottonwood, 5AM, Raccoon, Artful Dodge and many others.  He was co-recipient of the Academy of American Poets Award at the University of Pittsburgh, and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His most recent manuscript of poetry, “Blood Will Tell,” grows out of the Eastern European immigrant experience in the foundries and mills of western Pennsylvania at the turn of the last century.  Though he has recently developed an abiding affection for the city of Prague, he lives on a small farm in the Appalachians of eastern Ohio with his wife Karla, many cats and horses, and one good dog.