"The Book of Funnels is one of the strangest and most beautiful first books of poetry I have read in a long time."-John Ashbery Christian Hawkey constructs a visionary world rich with fantastic imagery. In blurring the line of reality versus imagination, this turbulent dreamscape calls into question the frightening and surprising nature of the actual world. Christian Hawkey's The Book of Funnels (Verse Press, 2004) received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Hawkey is co-founder of the international poetry journal jubilat, and he teaches at Pratt Institute.

"In his eagerly awaited second book, Hawkey (The Book of Funnels) continues to delve into surreal landscapes and word-bending sentences to create playful poems that entertain while also seeking orientation and stability in an imaginary world that mirrors the real one all too well. In an almost always deadpan tone, and usually in uneven columns or narrow couplets, Hawkey repurposes animals ('A horseshoe crab is a beautiful helmet'), relates natural and human phenomena ('pardon my shoulders,/ they shake when I laugh,/ the way the tip of a ship's mast/ records, for no one — not even the sky — / the contours of a given wave') and notes the precariousness of everyday life ('I tried to move the hole/ but there was another hole/ beneath it, which I fell through,/ over and over'). Poems with the word 'hour' in the title, spread throughout the collection, portray slices of unusual life: 'Drainage/ occurs, in real time.' Though they sometimes fizzle out at the end, there is much that is interesting in every one of these poems." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

CHRISTIAN HAWKEY was raised and home-schooled on Pine Island, Florida, and was later educated on both the West and East coasts. His poems have appeared in such journals as the Colorado Review, Volt, the Denver Quarterly, the American Poetry Review, and the Paris Review, and he is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the Pratt Institute in New York City. In 2000 he co-founded the international poetry journal, jubilat. He dwells in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn.