Requiem in Wide-Open Minor

Coming April 6th, 2027 - Books will ship the final week of March
Preorder now!

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 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. 

Justin Hunt grew up in rural Kansas. His poems have appeared in American Literary Review, Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Five Points, The Lascaux Review, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Puerto del Sol, Solstice, Southern Poetry Review, and Terrain.org, among others. His numerous awards include the Live Canon International Poetry Prize (U.K.), Porter Fleming Prize for Poetry, Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry, and 2nd-place finishes in the River Styx and Strokestown (Ireland) competitions. He has also been a finalist in several national poetry book contests. Fluent in German and Spanish, Justin lives with his wife, Janet, in New Mexico.

from 49 Imprint

The boy tracks the sounds—
the engine’s groan, the whirr 
of shifting gears as the rig 
wrestles up a rise and rolls 
beyond the midnight edge 
of all he knows. His six-block, 
barnyard town. His people. 
These dusty plains. His dreams 
of how, one day, he’ll leave 
what he can never leave.

from Knife and Salt

Do you wonder, I ask, if Descartes 
ever said, I feel pain, therefore I am?

You sigh, run your eyes to a remnant
of light in the oak above—as if, 

in your drift, you could reenter the time 
of our son, inhale his dusky scent. 

I honor your silence. But what I feel, 
what I know, what I want to say is, 

we have no choice but to watch
September settle on our garden.  

In Requiem in Wide-Open Minor, Justin Hunt transforms loss—the suicide of an only son—into poems of grace, honesty, and emotional complexity. Moving between the wide plains of rural Kansas, the vanished world of childhood, and the hard, ongoing work of grief, these poems consider loss in many forms: personal, familial, cultural, and mortal. Hunt’s voice is plainspoken, richly musical, and exact.  His compassion feels true. This is a deeply moving, brilliant collection that understands mourning not only as a burden, but as an act of memory and love.

—Kevin Prufer, author of The Fears

Requiem in Wide-Open Minor is a book of elemental grief—parents gone to “granite-slab” earth, a Kansas childhood steeped in wheat and wind, and the unthinkable loss of a son to tornado-torn sky. Justin Hunt’s poems inhabit a prairie both intimate and mythic, where freight trains, oil wells, and summer ballgames carry memory across generations. Even in requiem, there is no easy benediction: the heart remains wide open, resistant to closure, listening for what might outlast dust. “One day, he’ll leave / what he can never leave,” Hunt writes, capturing the paradox at the book’s core. These poems offer vulnerability as a kind of strongbox, language as the last rail braced across the dark.

 —Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Those Absences Now Closest and 2026 Recipient of the David Ferry and Ellen LaForge Prize in Poetry and Poetic Translation

Requiem in Wide-Open Minor is full of the landscapes and losses that shape us. Justin Hunt brings us poems full of highways and sunny afternoons, neighborhoods and night skies. But more than that he shows us how childhood is building a ghost that will haunt us through the years and how to measure a life by how far it is from a parent’s or child’s grave. These poems wrestle memory, trying to pull love back from the grip of time. Through these fields, through “dust and treeless sky / the long horizon / of what we cannot speak," these poems gather up all the light they can carry.

—Traci Brimhall, Poet Laureate of Kansas, 2023–2026

April 2027
104 pp
Trade paper – 6x9"
$20
ISBN 978-1-960327-28-4
Emerging Voices in Poetry