Paul Hunter has been a poet, teacher, performer, musician, instrument-maker, artist, editor and publisher. For the past nine years he has produced letterpress books under the imprint of Wood Works. His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest and Bloomsbury Review, as well as in two full-length books and several chapbooks.

About Breaking Ground:

"'The poetry of the earth is ceasingly never,' wrote Keats. Well, maybe, but sometimes we feel it slipping away, into 'condos and factory outlets / over good prime bottom land,' as Paul Hunter says in these poems that eloquently evoke the smell and feel of earth. Part georgics, part elegies, they bear vivid witness to an agrarian vision that is slowly becoming history."
—John Ashbery

"Breaking Ground is the finest poetic treatment of farming and farmers I have read since William Kloefkorn's Alvin Turner as Farmer. When Paul Hunter describes a brilliant midnight from the open door of an outhouse, the scene is drawn beautifully from undeniable recollection."
—David Lee

"Paul Hunter writes the sort of poems that work the way good neighbors out to: they make themselves known, and then they live quietly until they're needed. Hunter has, himself, been that sort of neighbor. Every poet I know will be glad to have this book."
—Samuel Green

"Breaking Ground captures a Midwestern farm life now almost lost and it does so in the rhythms of its own wily American speech, conversational, humorous, understated and shrewd."
—William H. Matchett

"I can almost imagine the man in his workshop with clamp and burin. Paul Hunter's poems are much like a fine guitar, exceedingly well joined of ordinary materials carefully assembled to create an elegant sound. This is a book I have been looking forward to for a long time."
—Bart Baxter