Requiem in Wide-Open Minor

This fresh and plainspoken collection of poetry blends lyric and narrative, dream and memory, while grappling with the loss of people and places. In Requiem in Wide-Open Minor, Justin Hunt grapples with the death of his adult son and the loss of his Kansas childhood—a rural way of life that vanished long ago but pulses yet in the deepest part of him. These are poems of remembrance and longing, of prairies and grain elevators and souls departed, of dreams about a son now gone, of marriage and of a wife who shares in the poet’s discovery of everyday beauty even as they face their own mortality. Here, then, an elegy for a beloved son, a hymn to the Southern Plains and its people, a testament to resilience.