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Review of Tom C. Hunley’s The Tongue
Wind Publications, 2004.
104 pages. $14.00

By Jeannine Hall Gailey

 Tom C. Hunley recently did his alma mater (the University of Washington) proud when he published an erudite essay on using memorization techniques to teach poetry writing in the May 2005 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle. But the “Tom C. Hunley, professor” personae evaporates when you open the pages of his hilarious, cutting first book, The Tongue. Remember this doesn’t mean that Hunley doesn’t know his way around a ghazal, or even how to marry two forms (see his “Haiku Sonnet”), or how to throw around references to literary figures, but his casual diction and pop-culture street cred make it all seem effortless, not stuffy and conservative.

            A lot of these poems are first-person narratives, but Hunley, bucking a trend for autobiography, seems as apt to write about the people around him as himself; some of his strongest poems are the stories of his friends, family, lovers. The book is divided into three sections, “Delicate Creatures,” about his baby, his pets, old girlfriends and other fragile beings including himself, “The Hard Sciences,” the strongest section, with poems related to and about, surprise surprise, science, and “Some Green Place,” in which the author meditates on place, nature, cars, philosophy, and insomnia.

            One of the strongest poems in the collection, “Biology,” from the second section, deals with a classmate’s suicide, in unsentimental and evocative terms:

            “…and if
 you put him under a microscope,

you’d have seen that

he would steal your jacket,

pawn it to buy coke,

and then help you look for it.

Our senior year, Ron OD’d and died

-suicide-

and everyone forgot

that they’d ever called him “Rat.”  (33)

Hunley’s gift for understatement, irony, and the ability to juxtapose humor with tragedy are all on display in this poem. The poems “Chemistry” and “Chemistry II” involve the author’s relationship with his mother-in-law, and, especially in “Chemistry II,” reveal the author’s charming and astounding ability for associations:

“She called me ‘Mr. Toad.’ The nickname made me wince.

I thought of the arcade game, Frogger. I thought of my life

Ended by a tractor tire. ‘Desperate Druggies Lick

Cane Toads,’ a headline said, and I read of young women

Licking toads…” (44)

I mean, to go from hallucinogenic substances from amphibians, video games, and mother-in-law’s pet names – Hunley’s imaginative twists are what kept me reading breathlessly straight through the collection, eager to see where he’d take me next.

In one of his rare professorial moments in the book, Hunley’s speaker exhorts his students in the poem “After a Lesson on Conjunctions, My Students Give Me Apples. I’d Prefer Mangoes.” to write “your most exotic, eccentric, mango-like writing,/ your most tropical, sun-kissed, mango-like writing.” (76) It seems that Hunley has taken his own advice, presenting the reader with mango-like poem after mango-like poem, exotic, interesting, but still accessible, open, delicious to the reader. Forgive the pun, but Hunley’s intelligent tongue-in-cheek wit sparkles along with his unflinching willingness to look at himself and his world honestly.