Here's some poetry for you.

Farmer poet Paul Hunter's reading at Destinations Booksellers on Saturday was truly one of the most thoughtful, thought provoking presentations I've experienced since moving to New Albany. Personally, his stories and erudite phrase turns served as a reconciliation of sorts: my household's city dwelling tendencies are largely the result of shared rural roots and an urge to preserve them.

Hunter's latest work, One Seed to Another, though still skillfully presented among more anecdotal truth telling, is a little less poetry and more factual hammering.

Consider this passage from a section titled "The Great Thirst":

The most neutral way to consider our choices might be as a physics problem, energy in versus energy out. With traditional organic agriculture, depending on animal-powered or human-muscle input, once calorie of energy will grow to 4 to 6 calories of food. By contrast, using current agribusiness methods and equipment, it takes ten calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of food-- which makes traditional farming and gardening 40 to 60 times as energy efficient as petrochemical monocropping. And we include transportation, we climb aboard the fast track to absurdity.

NA Event Watch: farmer poet Paul Hunter at Destinations, Farmer's Market, July 24.

'One Seed to Another' is staggering and bracing in its truths and relevance. This is straight talk from a man whose every breath is poetry and whose heartbeat is directly plugged into farming as right livelihood.

His accomplishment is our accomplishment for these words in this seminal book are at once familiar and fresh, testing and taunting. They give us ourselves. - Lynn Miller, Small Farmer's Journal

Paul will be chatting and signing books at the Destinations Booksellers table at the New Albany Farmer's Market from 9-11 a.m. and will then do a reading at the store at 12 p.m.

A bio from PBS Newshour, where there's additional information, poems, and streaming media:

Paul Hunter is a poet, musician, instrument-maker, teacher, and editor and publisher. For over a decade, he has produced letterpress books and broadsides under the imprint of Wood Works Press, located in Seattle.

His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Bloomsbury Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Poetry and Poetry Northwest.

Hunter is the author of several chapbooks and four books of poetry: "Ripening" (2006) and "Breaking Ground" (2005 Washington State Book Award), both published by Silverfish Review Press; "Mockingbird" (1981, Jawbone Press) and "Pullman" (1976, University of Washington Press).

He's also a member of the Small Farms Conservancy.