PARKER LOGAN is from Orlando, Florida and lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His work has recently appeared in Barely South, HAD, and MEMEZINE’s The Slop Review. He is a teen library tech at the East Baton Rouge Public Library. You can read more about him at parkerpoetry.org
It’s been as cold as it gets down here in South Louisiana, and when the weather turns chilly, I like to make something hot, spicy, full of flavor, and filling. Usually I make a pot of soup, and there’s a thousand places in Baton Rouge where I can get an excellent bowl of gumbo, but Tom C. Hunley has a recipe for chili in his poem “My Chili Recipe: An Ars Poetica” from his latest collection, The Loneliest Whale in the World, out now with Terrapin Books, that I think I might like to try. Here’s some of his ingredients:
1 diced onion
3 pounds of ground beef
3 Tbsp. Dale’s seasoning sauce
every ache in your body
thee and thou and thy and the way all three make your tongue feel under your teeth
3 Tbsp. of sugar
Here’s the first instructions for cooking: “Begin with the river. Brown beef and memories of the dead with garlic, green peppers, the heartsong of the near-shattered violinist, and onion. Love the world the way a horse's spirit gallops in its body.”
If you think that sounds delicious, the rest of the book is even more so. Tom C. Hunley’s eighth full length collection of poems does what I love so much about his other work: spot on, off the wall images, surprising turns from line to line, and a beating heart that unfolds itself, line by line, until it exposes the rawest form of whatever emotion he is trying to convey. The final line in a Hunley poem can be a warm hug or hard truth, but whatever it is, you feel completely satisfied that it is the final word, full on what he’s been ruminating.
In this collection, Hunley’s speaker grapples with fatherhood, parenting an adopted daughter and a son with autism, aging, and how in the process of getting older, you get lonelier. For Hunley, though, age in these poems does not come with a wealth of knowledge, but the understanding that there are blind spots that even the most patient, knowledgeable, and wise cannot see. In his poem “Dear God, Show Me How to Walk in Wonder,” he writes, “I stumble like a foal, / a fool, a fawn, a phony. I fail, I fall, / I, who taught, by tall example, / my children to walk.”
This book is filled with instances where the speaker is humbled, fails, and doesn’t know things while also carrying the responsibility of being a teacher and somebody his children are looking up to, roles that are imaged to be guiding forces in this chaotic world, forces that Hunley is telling us are just as flawed as the children they are teaching. This book acknowledges that there are places his speaker either can’t see or is not allowed to go, and that even though you’ve been around the block before, you’ve only been around your block and nobody else’s, like the title of a later poem, “If You’ve Met One Autistic Person, You’ve Met One Autistic Person,” suggests.
Ultimately, Tom C. Hunley and this book are letting us know that we are not alone in our wanderings, something his speaker tells their late student at the end of the poem “Will Be Done.” We’re all walking through this world with some vague idea of what we’re doing and the challenges are piling up. Sometimes we do have to face things alone, but with a poet like Tom C. Hunley in the world, we can find comfort in knowing that somebody else has been here before.
The Loneliest Whale in the World by tom c. hunley, Terrapin, 2024. 112 pages.
Volume 15.1, Winter 25
Parker Logan