There’s irony around the edges, but it’s not a trap. Lauren Hunter will pull you all the way through to “the very it of it” with her frightening, sharp, steady, comic, mournful, intimate poems.

From within these poems we observe a great longing bloom and walk.  We reach out while we look at the world through new eyes. Human Achievements explores a contemporary landscape in human isolation, isolation from truth, love, genuine contact and vision.

Human Achievements is full of friends, aching, bleeding, feeling fine, the city, and listening. You know the right song can change everything, and can be a conduit for energy or rage? “I look the day right in the eye and tell it to go fuck itself.” The right song can also turn you into a ghost.

Lauren Hunter is an amazing dancer.  Full of subtle gestures and playful turns, she's capable of deep dance floor introspection and moments of singular righteousness. She knows that dancing is about being with others as much as it is about being alone; she understands how to draw you in with a look, and how to turn mysteriously away into a private groove.

I feel so happy about this book of poetry by Lauren Hunter, “this unremarkable bloom” whose key words are “human” and “achievement.” At a time when human is being cast as “without anything,” Hunter’s poems remind us that efforts toward beauty, toward imperfect and beautiful thinking, is to be in an actual ‘human’ place, and that the reason one goes there is in order to love. Human Achievements and the poetry writing it will inspire in me and others will be a barricade against the rapid loss of the human I crave, the human that I’ve taken pleasure in, a human that, without the defense of poets like Lauren Hunter, is ever, in every nanosecond, accelerating toward extinction.