• Back Seat with Fish: A Man’s Adventures in Angling and Romance
  • Book title Bunch of Animals
    Bunch of Animals
  • Men Holding Eggs
  • The Art of Angling: Poems about Fishing
  • Moist Meridian

Henry Hughes shares his three favorite books on fishing

3 Good Books invites writers & artists to share their favorite books on a given theme.

“There are dozens of good books involving sport fishing, and many of our greatest authors have found in fishing some of life’s happiest and most painful moments,” notes Hughes, who admits difficulty in narrowing his favorite books on fishing. “Chekhov, Yeats, Ted Hughes, Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Annie Proulx, to name but a few, loved to fish and write about it. Among those essayists who write specifically about fishing, I count David James Duncan, Ted Leeson, Marjorie Sandor, and Thomas McGuane as the best.”

Read more at Push Pull Books.

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Shutter Lines: New book by Henry Hughes and Paul Gentry

Shutter Lines

Shutter Lines

From Cloudbank Books: Oregon Book Award-winning poet Henry Hughes journeys with master artist Paul Gentry to explore Oregon and the state of America. They create a conversation that is moving, thoughtful, politically engaging and refreshingly playful

What people are saying about 
Shutter Lines:

“Henry Hughes is one of the great Northwest poets in top form, and now with Paul Gentry and his extraordinary photographs, we get an amazing, unforgettable collection.” 
—Willy Vlautin

“Photography, poetry, fiction, film—it’s all the same job—to find the right detail that says it all. The resonant details in Gentry’s photographs have leapt into Hughes’ fine writing, bringing people to life and those lives into sharp focus.”
—Christopher Rauschenberg

“I like Steinbeck’s work, always have. America seen from close to the ground, nothing fancy, just real. That’s what I get out of Henry Hughes’ writing. Paul Gentry’s photos beautifully echo this writing—they seem to have a loneliness to them, a quietness, too.”
—Rick Bartow

“The collaboration in Shutter Lines is so complete that the photographer has come to work like a poet and the poet like a photographer. This book is innovative, investigative, and insightful.” 
—David Biespiel

Paul Gentry and Henry Hughes

Paul Gentry and Henry Hughes

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Review of Ted Leeson’s Inventing Montana: Dispatches from the Madison Valley

Henry recently reviewed  Ted Leeson’s book, Inventing Montana: Dispatches from the Madison Valley for Harvard Review Online:

Ted Leeson makes the disclaimer that he is just a “seasonal resident” who for over twenty years has spent several weeks every summer living above and fishing the Madison River in southwest Montana. “And if my familiarity with the place runs only skin-deep, I am satisfied, for it is our skins that wrap us in sensation.” Leeson’s distance, humility, acute sensitivity and tail-flipping wit make Inventing Montana a fresh, humorous, and insightful book on a region that is reverently fished, camped, explored, and over-described. “Montana” is, after all, just “a word that closes distances, a name for a curved roof of sky and a place fashioned beneath it.”

Click to read the full review.

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Robert Pinsky comments on Moist Meridian

“Frank O’Hara’s call for poetry “better than the movies” suggests qualities of movement, vividness, clarity and music: a high standard, met by the poems of Moist Meridian. It won’t do to exaggerate the cinematic quality of the poems, with their flashes of narrative, rapid cuts, crisp dialogue, fresh characters; the kind of thinking and the language are those of a poet— and  distinctively reflective poet. The compression and swift varying of mood are those of poetry, as in the opening sentence-fragment of “Black Walnuts,”: little charred brains/ on November streets, where folks from Hope House/ lurch and bump, run rain-suited/ down to Rick’s Coffee and the market,/ over-greeting the kind and idle.” Alertness, generosity, irony and candor govern these poems, which are endlessly curious about the relations among people, with sex, friendship, marriage and alienation examples of an abiding, fearful but engaging mystery. An engaging, uneasy and clear-sighted book.”

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