For more than 30 years, Paul Christensen has been a prominent voice in Texas letters. An indefatigable critic, strong poet, and radio host for an interview program, he has defined some major literary concerns associated with his adopted state. In his criticism, he has given a range of vision that goes far beyond that of many of his contemporaries. He is also an award-winning writer of short stories. The poems of Hard Country make up his most recently published work and present his readers with a thoroughly realized journey that begins at a point noticeably beyond that slurry described by so many small voices in a lot of contemporary poetry. Going into the beautifully severe rigors of West Texas desert country, Christensen finds a complex of imagery and ideas that gives him access to what one ought to acknowledge right away as a vision of experience.
James Hoggard, review of Hard Country. The Texas Observer (October 6, 2006).

Paul Christensen has long been one of the foremost critics of poetry in the United States. With Hard Country he makes his bid to become one of the foremost poets. In his seminal book, West of the American Dream: An Encounter with Texas, he does a short, succinct history of how modern poetry has taken root in Texas and flourished in spite of a hostile environment which is but a mirror image of the anti-intellectualism afflicting the entire country. He certainly is one of a handful of Texas poets who continues to demand serious attention here and abroad.
Paul Foreman

Nationally recognized as a literary critic of American postmodernism, Paul Christensen has been writing remarkable poems for thirty-years—and none stronger than those in The Mottled Air or in this new book, Hard Country. . . Christensen’s signature form continues to be the long graceful sentence studded with sudden epiphanies and his elegiac tone reveals a truthfulness rarely encountered in contemporary poetry.
Robert Bonazzi