Here Lies

Tom Hunley’s Here Lies is an entirely delightful book of poems, a rarity in many ways as much of 21st Century poetry is unapproachably dull and too serious about itself. Hunley, page after page, delivers comic insight and wit into the dark matter of living and dying. If life is too serious to take seriously, then Hunley gives the reader access to the cosmic joke and keeps us enthralled—by the music he brings to his poems and by the strange newness in which he sees. Here Lies is not necessarily the beginning of an epitaph, nor the beginning of a limerick, but it may be the introduction to some grandiose untruth. Here, in this place where we live and breathe, are the lies that make us silly creatures. Hunley leads us into the valley of death and gives us cause to laugh about it.