Bed of Coals is a revised and corrected paperback reissue of Joe’s Colorado Poetry Award-winning 8th collection, previously available only in the out-of-print hardback edition.
Title: Bed of Coals
ISBN: 978-1938853333
Publication Date: January 21, 2014
Length: 78 pages
Binding: Trade paper
“This collection impresses me as far more than skillful, very much lived and intense. Intensity is its strength and the skill is pervasive. Poem after poem convinces, both as experience and as a well-crafted verbal object.”
— Reg Saner, author of So This Is the Map and Living Large in Nature
“Bed of Coals interestingly posits two speakers: an outsider whose poems all have ‘Vander Meer’ in their titles; and Vander Meer, who presents himself and his crisis in two contexts, one as entries in his ‘blue notebook,’ the other as the speaker of the remaining poems in the collection. […] Hutchison is … a master-maker of images, and his use of verbs/verbals can be stunningly effective. [His] wit, excellent sense of timing, and language skills save [Vander Meer] from turning into an object of our contempt rather than our sympathy. Hutchison has learned well the modernist’s tool of romantic irony, which he wields very skillfully.”
— Ronald Moran in Northeast magazine
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
