Free Hugs : Selected and New Poems
by Jefferson Carter
Publication Date: March 18, 2025 | LCCN: 2024951586
Paperback: $16.95 USD | ISBN 978-1-58775-058-8
E-Book: $9.99 USD | ISBN 978-1-58775-059-5
About the Book | A Poem | About the Author | Praise
Free Hugs was a winner in the 2025 New Mexico Book Association’s Southwest Book Design and Production Awards!
About the Book
The thirteenth book by Jefferson Carter, Free Hugs collects poems from his four most recent books, Get Serious, Diphtheria Festival, Birkenstock Blues, and Yesternow, and adds to this selection over twenty new poems. Carter’s poetry is direct, clear, accessible, often wise, and always funny.
Viejo
She
dressed me
with her eyes.
About the Author
Jefferson Carter has work in such journals as Carolina
Quarterly, Barrow Street, and Rattle. Chax Press published his ninth collection, Get Serious: New and Selected Poems, a Southwest Best Book of 2013. Yesternow, his eleventh book, is available through his website: jeffersoncarterverse.com.
Carter lives in Tucson with his wife Connie. He taught
composition and poetry for 30 years at Pima Community College.
Praise
Poems of passionate response, to the world, to inner life, to feeling itself. Whether complaint or celebration, Carter’s poems offer us the full reach
— Alberto Ríos, Arizona’s First Poet Laureate
from personal to universal in a heartbeat.
Carter’s humor shields “the heart of a romantic, replete with a compassionate response to, and acknowledgement of duhkha. At times, the poet he most reminds me of is Billy Collins, but a more mordant, twisted, even punk Collins.
— Frank Jude Boccio, author of Mindfulness Yoga