The Undersides of Leaves is Joseph Hutchison’s first full-length collection. The cover and interior woodcuts are by Denver artist Patty Miller.
ISBN: 0-933573-02-2
Publication Date: 1985
Length: 58 pages
Binding: Trade paper
“Poets reading The Undersides of Leaves will recognize in its pages a writer of great skill and inventiveness. But who cares about what poets think? Contemporary poetry needs readers who aren’t poets, reader who will be moved not by technique but by the oetry that rises above it. And for these important readers, this book holds a number of moving poems—poems like ‘Old Blind Woman,’ ‘Straight Razor,’ and ‘Sunrise Off Point Grey.’ There isn’t a poem in this collection that doesn’t testify to Joseph Hutchison’s mastery of language, image and form.”
“Farmhouses up to their hips in fog, the angry boredom of children indoors on rainy days, rocks with their rough backs turned to storms…. Hutchison has his sharp eye on interior life as often as not, but it’s the surface of the earth, with its ceaseless, delicate changes, that is the beloved hero of the poems—these injunctions that we keepour eyes open, that we not turn away.”
“Hutchison’s poems in The Undersides of Leaves are electric and disturbing…. His poems arise from an inflamed vision and the willingness to explore the forbidden in the tradition of Blake and Baudelaire”
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. 
