Breakfast With Unicorns

Poems by Hunter Boone

 Breakfast With Unicorns is a quintessential display of Boone’s most important work over the past thirty years, a tour-de-force that showcases the author’s talent for co-mingling common-place experiences of love, loss, longing and desire with the uncommon ability to capture these experiences with language that is imaginative, evocative and unforgettable.
 
In entering this world, not only does Boone present the reader with that rare and illusive creature, the unicorn, he also introduces us to a love interest who is (or resembles) a reptile, “Ms. Alligator,” along with asking us to ponder a minotaur’s relationship with his dead (human) girlfriend, “The Jilted Minotaur.”  In addition, the reader is asked to ponder saboteurs of the moment in his disquieting poem, “Consequences.”
 
In all of this, Breakfast With Unicorns further demonstrates Boone’s capacity for both wit and irony without losing his empathetic connection to the reader and without being overly sentimental. 

Raves and Reviews

"Breakfast with Unicorns is an exceptional debut collection. A bold, brutal, yet beautiful poetic soliloquy of a harsh world with “colossal sharks who  lurk / both male and female, with their / prima donna chumps.” Boone showcases the complexity of emotion. His devastating portrayal of loss is haunting in “East of Oakland,” “a presence that did not last a lifetime …yourself irretrievably gone / as if flattened into chalk lines / like marks around the body at a crime scene / once the body is gone.” A voice to watch. " 
                                                                             --Deborah Edgeley, Editor-in-Chief, Ink Pantry Publishing

"With this debut collection, Boone deftly cuts to the core of what it is to be human—and the frailty that comes with it—by often focusing on the seemingly simple and “forgettable” elements of everyday existence. Whether it’s one of those incidents of bullying in adolescence that sticks with a person for the rest of their life (“Me and Dorothea and The Rocket Wheel”) or the use of food as a metaphor for something far more disquieting (“Cooking Lesson”), Breakfast With Unicorns puts vivid words to certain all-too-common experiences. Another key aspect of what makes Boone’s poetry such a revelation is his penchant for wielding the mythic and the divine (“The Jilted Minotaur” and “Polyphemus at Water’s Edge,” among others) all in such a way as to relate his readers back to the complexity of mere mortal emotion."
                                                                      --Genna Rivieccio, Editor-in-Chief, The Opiate Magazine