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 Bad Harvest

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 skies/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