The Odyssey

by Ken Hunt

Fifty years ago, in July 1969, human beings embarked on an epic journey to land on the moon. Now, in July 2019, poet Ken Hunt utilizes NASA's Apollo 11 voice transcription document, a chronicle of the first six days of that mission, to create The Odyssey , an erasure poem of star charts carved from the technical jargon and offhand remarks found in that transmission. The resulting text is both a progressive investigation and a commemorative homage to a major historic event; it will transport you from the surface of our planet to the eerie territory of outer space, a realm populated by the disembodied voices of ghosts, gods, and lost explorers. The Odyssey compares the astronauts of the 20th and 21st centuries to seafarers of ancient Greek literature, mythic figures who devoted their lives to endeavours of discovery and understanding. Praise for The Odyssey : "Like the first footprints of a sailor disembarking on an undiscovered island, Ken Hunt's The Odyssey transforms the landscape. Each word is a blip, a wow, a tiny galley afloat on the Sea of Tranquility. Loaded with the loot found by sifting and sorting through the speeches of Luna's suitors, The Odyssey is an epic in miniature, a hymn in the dark. Others will follow, and surely find their way home." —Derek Beaulieu, author of a, A Novel and A Romance of Many Dimensions "Just as the moon is formed from parts of the earth scattered by an interstellar collision, the erasure poems in Ken Hunt's The Odyssey reimagine the disembodied voices of the Apollo 11 lunar mission to create spectacular intersecting orbital trajectories involving amazement, fear, classical deities, conspiracy theories, and the contested space between dominance and discovery. If the moon's "rough country / ought to be a / book," this is it. These remarkable and otherworldly poems impress like constellations in the night sky and footprints in the dust. I cannot guarantee you will safely return to earth." —Adam Dickinson, author of The Polymers and Anatomic

Genres: Poetry

310 pages, Paperback

Published August 20, 2019

About the author

Ken Hunt’s writing has appeared in Chromium Dioxide, No Press, Matrix, and Freefall. For three years, Ken served as Managing Editor of NōD Magazine, and for one year as Poetry Editor of filling Station. Ken holds an MA in English from Concordia University and is the founder of Spacecraft Press, an online publisher of experimental writing inspired by science and technology. The LUMA Foundation published his first book of poetry, Space Administration, in 2014. His second and third books of poetry, The Lost Cosmonauts and The Odyssey, were published by Book*hug Press in the fall of 2018 and the fall of 2019, respectively. Ken is a PhD candidate at the University of Western Ontario.

Reviews

[Lance Spreacker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my first introduction to erasure poetry and to Ken Hunt. The whole piece evoked a sense of wonder at how Hunt was able to transform these most likely very scientific documents to a piece of art. It also tied well in the the purpose of portraying these astronauts as the Greeks from The Odyssey by reference to Apollo (obviously) and to a sense of thing happening to them by outside forces personified.

I will definitely checkout more of Hunt's work and will have to re-read this book again eventually!