Spuyten Duyvil Press Releases

	Fiction Non-Fiction Poetry Film Art MEB Authors Press Events Distribution Contacts	Spuyten Duyvil to Publish the First Full-Length Work by Best-Kept Southern Literary Secret J. Hunter Patterson “I grew up on the edge of Hunger and Hardship Creek Swamp. It was there that my early ideas rose from the reflections of a still pool on the wings of a black snake doctor, fluttering in and out of a ray of sunlight filtered through the birch trees and into the liquid, iridescent for that captured moment, leading me into a world from which I would never look back.” NEW YORK, NY, September 15, 2003 — New York independent publisher Spuyten Duyvil is honored to present the first publication of a major work by the late, previously unknown Southern writer J. Hunter Patterson, The Banks of Hunger and Hardship (A Map of Time). The book will be available in stores and direct from the publisher as of December 8, 2003. A richly evocative, adventurous hybrid of memoir and visionary prose-poetry, The Banks of Hunger and Hardship is a coming-of-age story as well as a meditation on mortality—and immortality—compellingly told in a singular voice. By turns poignant, humorous and hallucinatory, the book vividly recalls the author’s experiences in the Georgia creek swamp that he extensively explored during his childhood and youth, following him into the larger world he entered as an adult and the more unpredictable landscape of his dreams and his elaborate imagination. The Native American past of the region where he spent most of his life provides a haunting historical backdrop to the story. The great Creek/Seminole warrior Osceola and an eccentric, opium-smoking dandy known as the Margrave of Azilia are among the small but remarkable cast of characters the author encounters as he traverses the swamp and several centuries. “The map of time is difficult to read, for it has been folded too many times, leaving frayed creases to guess about... In that map was a representation of the times of the events, spelled out in a board of forever, with a mystery in the core of its spiraling passage. The mapped area of time is the life of an individual, in this case mine, of what I did.” Featuring hypnotic prose as rich as nature itself, Patterson exhorts the simple beauty of solitary experience as he immerses himself in the entomological, the horticultural, the arboreal, and the astronomical. The book engulfs the reader in the swamplands of Georgia, where myth and reality intersect. About the book, poet Robert Creeley says, “Rare indeed to find someone so able to read the text of his or her physical life with such poignant clarity. In these articulate reflections the literal worlds of water and woods become the informing spirit of sustenance and survival.” Born in Vidalia, Georgia in 1955, and startlingly literate and creative at an early age, Patterson wrote poems, stories, and experimental prose throughout his entire life, but he had almost no work published in his lifetime. Until his death in 1996 at age 41 as a result of side-effects from chemotherapy prescribed after he tested positive for antibodies to HIV, Patterson supported himself primarily as a land-title researcher, but he was more a jack-of-all-trades. As writer, art critic, and brother of the author Tom Patterson writes in the Introduction, “J. Hunter Patterson was a sharp-eyed, widely read naturalist, poet, linguist, scholar of literature and history, amateur astronomer, math whiz, raconteur, translator, polemicist, musician, visual artist and all-around ‘character’...” “In this great battle for the soul of America, I just hope that I will be allowed to retain my own soul. I could not live without it, for it is all that I have within that holds what it holds without.” The Banks of Hunger and Hardship is just the beginning of the revival of the writing of J. Hunter Patterson—a collection of his selected poems and short prose is currently in the works as well.

Spuyten Duyvil to Publish the First Full-Length Work by
Best-Kept Southern Literary Secret J. Hunter Patterson

“I grew up on the edge of Hunger and Hardship Creek Swamp. It was there that my early ideas rose from the reflections of a still pool on the wings of a black snake doctor, fluttering in and out of a ray of sunlight filtered through the birch trees and into the liquid, iridescent for that captured moment, leading me into a world from which I would never look back.”

NEW YORK, NY, September 15, 2003 — New York independent publisher Spuyten Duyvil is honored to present the first publication of a major work by the late, previously unknown Southern writer J. Hunter Patterson, The Banks of Hunger and Hardship (A Map of Time). The book will be available in stores and direct from the publisher as of December 8, 2003.

A richly evocative, adventurous hybrid of memoir and visionary prose-poetry, The Banks of Hunger and Hardship is a coming-of-age story as well as a meditation on mortality—and immortality—compellingly told in a singular voice. By turns poignant, humorous and hallucinatory, the book vividly recalls the author’s experiences in the Georgia creek swamp that he extensively explored during his childhood and youth, following him into the larger world he entered as an adult and the more unpredictable landscape of his dreams and his elaborate imagination.

The Native American past of the region where he spent most of his life provides a haunting historical backdrop to the story. The great Creek/Seminole warrior Osceola and an eccentric, opium-smoking dandy known as the Margrave of Azilia are among the small but remarkable cast of characters the author encounters as he traverses the swamp and several centuries.

“The map of time is difficult to read, for it has been folded too many times, leaving frayed creases to guess about... In that map was a representation of the times of the events, spelled out in a board of forever, with a mystery in the core of its spiraling passage. The mapped area of time is the life of an individual, in this case mine, of what I did.”

Featuring hypnotic prose as rich as nature itself, Patterson exhorts the simple beauty of solitary experience as he immerses himself in the entomological, the horticultural, the arboreal, and the astronomical. The book engulfs the reader in the swamplands of Georgia, where myth and reality intersect.

About the book, poet Robert Creeley says, “Rare indeed to find someone so able to read the text of his or her physical life with such poignant clarity. In these articulate reflections the literal worlds of water and woods become the informing spirit of sustenance and survival.”

Born in Vidalia, Georgia in 1955, and startlingly literate and creative at an early age, Patterson wrote poems, stories, and experimental prose throughout his entire life, but he had almost no work published in his lifetime. Until his death in 1996 at age 41 as a result of side-effects from chemotherapy prescribed after he tested positive for antibodies to HIV, Patterson supported himself primarily as a land-title researcher, but he was more a jack-of-all-trades.

As writer, art critic, and brother of the author Tom Patterson writes in the Introduction, “J. Hunter Patterson was a sharp-eyed, widely read naturalist, poet, linguist, scholar of literature and history, amateur astronomer, math whiz, raconteur, translator, polemicist, musician, visual artist and all-around ‘character’...”

“In this great battle for the soul of America, I just hope that I will be allowed to retain my own soul. I could not live without it, for it is all that I have within that holds what it holds without.”

The Banks of Hunger and Hardship is just the beginning of the revival of the writing of J. Hunter Patterson—a collection of his selected poems and short prose is currently in the works as well.