“Free Hugs” poetry collection by Jefferson Carter

Jefferson Carter’s grand collection of poetry, Free Hugs (Coyote Arts 2025) is a delight, displaying a perceptive talent for phrasing and filled with apt observations and acute insights. While Carter was an academic for a long while, these poems are not per se academic poems with heavy literary allusions but rather they are a kind of everyman poetry, with a Billy Collins vibe, and a wry twist of humor in many of them. Which is not to say they are not intelligent poems because they are very much that. The topics are those that readers should easily relate to—marriage, getting older, anxiety, a fondness for cats, family and cultural ironies and rifts. While often introspective and sometimes bittersweet, the poems are vibrant and, while cynical in places, overall maintain a quality of guarded pleasure in living a rich life with a good wife, cats, and worthy pursuits. The poems are also concise, with a precise and efficient quality that enriches their visceral impact.

Free Hugs contains twenty-three new poems, as well as many selected from Carter’s prior books, including Get Serious, Diphtheria Festival, Birkenstock Blues, andYesternow. These prior publications range from 2013 to the present. Topics and themes range widely—something that adds greatly to the readability and enjoyment of this collection. One never quite knows what the next poem will be about—but it won’t take much reading in the book to know the next poem will be vivid and captivating. Carter once wrote of himself and his poetry: “I’m an opportunist, not a poet with a plan.  Whatever catches my fancy, I write about: an engaging image, a political or environmental issue, a bit of zoology, an overheard conversation, and, of course, love. In grad school, I fell for Jonathan Swift.  Fifty years later, I still have to rein in my satirical impulses to protect whatever is tender in my poems.”

Yes, those satirical impulses he mentions, as well as cultural, historical, and political ironies, are obvious in many poems in Free Hugs. Take the opening poem, “Mockingbird,” in which Carter writes: “Our third president owned / a pet mockingbird named Dick. / Let’s not mention what else / he owned.” In continuing this poem about Thomas Jefferson, he concludes that Dick wobbles “on his perch like a double / fistful of dirty cotton.”

In the poem “Southern Fried,” Carter also captures another irony of our times by writing:

You can’t eat a fertilized egg

in Alabama. Preborn chickens

have rights there. Postborn

chickens, however, may be

baked or southern fried.

Food for thought.

While irony does play a strong role in Carter’s astute poems, he also proves to be a gifted storyteller within his verses. For example, in “Cashmere,” he writes of his 77-year-old widowed mother falling in love with an elderly gay man. When she invites this man to a family party, “[h]e arrived with another man, both / wearing identical powder-blue / cashmere sweaters.” The poem concludes with the mother flirting with the man “who, beneath the kitchen counter, / pressed his leg against the leg / of the one he came with.”

Family takes center stage in many poems, including several about marriage, many with dry humor, but also much poignancy and tenderness. In “For My Sister, the Feminist,” Carter asks:

Don’t you remember

the night you woke up

sobbing & I left

my bed down the hall

to hold your hand

until you fell back to sleep?

Several poems reflect issues with aging—Carter has been retired from teaching for nearly two decades—including one called “Thin Skin.” After commenting on how his skin now tears on the “slightest contact” and that he is “bad as a bleeding heart, maybe / worse,” Carter observes, then asks: “I can’t finish reading this novel / about Scott and Zelda. When did everything / become so unbearably sad?”

Throughout this engaging collection, Carter makes excellent use of similes, including another one on aging in the poem “Arbitrary.” He writes: “someday you’ll feel like me, / like a barely legal alien / on a stolen unicycle.” And in “Tsunami,” there is “the shadow of the approaching wave / rising against the building like night filling / up the window when you raise the shade.” In “Shotgun,” he writes again of aging with this: “Sometimes I feel / like a Family Dollar store / in a dying strip mall.”

Carter comments in the poem “Cat & Snake” that he swore he’d “stop writing  / about cats,” but then “here she comes / down the hall, our little black cat… .” Several others cat poems grace the collection, and it’s a wonderful thing they do as they enliven the collection with a blend of artistry, charm, and the biting commentary at which Carter excels. Cat poems originally from Birkenstock Blues include “Cat & Transient” with its social ironies, and “Cat & Apocalypse I” in which Carter in a mere seven lines captures not only a kind of political horror, but also tenderness—all wrapped up with a killer last line.

I’m watching our little black cat

sitting in the sink, drinking

from the faucet, her eyes closed

in ecstasy. When the world ends,

I won’t mourn my fucked-up species,

I’ll regret our cat’s moment of terror

when the water turns to flame.

In “Cat & Apocalypse II,” which is one of the new poems, Carter expands upon the original poem and concludes:

I’m not laughing. I’m wondering

what our cat will encounter

after the thermonuclear flash-bang,

how she’ll survive once she abandons

her porcelain bomb shelter

to become, at least, an outdoor cat.

All in all, Free Hugs is a moving, powerful collection of poetry, rich with the everyman’s everyday, well blended and tossed with life and death’s universal themes. Compassionate at times, bitter at times, with self-deprecating humor balanced with acute observational sensitivity and depth, these poems ring with relevance. Rich and rewarding to read, Free Hugs is a grand collection of Carter’s finest work.

Jefferson Carter

Jefferson Carter is widely published in literary journals and is the author of twelve prior books of poetry. A Tucsonan since 1953, he holds a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona and taught composition and poetry writing at Pima Community College for roughly thirty years, chairing the writing department for eighteen years before retiring in 2008. These days Carter concentrates on writing and poetry readings. He lives in Tucson with his wife, Connie.

[Reviewer’s Note: The quotes are from copyrighted materials and appear here with the poet’s permission. “Cat & Apocalypse I” appears in its entirety while the other quotes are excerpts. Jefferson Carter’s photo is by Bill Moeller. The cover of Free Hugs is from a painting by Jim Waid, considered one of Arizona’s most celebrated painters who currently lives and works in Tucson.]