Dougie Padilla’s 40 feet down

Selected one of 2025’s best books of poetry by The Latinx Project at New York University Dougie Padialla’s 40 feet down centers around the natural world and Padilla’s coonhound, painting and the art world, sports, writing, love, climate change, the nastiness of contemporary politics, aging, and living a life centered on the spiritual.

Poet bio: long ago and far away i was a young poet. i wrote constantly. then came the vietnam war and all the protests. and then came san francisco and psychedelics and communes around the country. a psychotic break came. heart failure came. and ashrams and organic farming with horses. eventually, there were kids and houses and marriage and businesses. and even grand kids…

now its over fifty years later and out of the blue poetry returned, quick and sure. i’d moved my art studio to a village along the mighty mississippi to beat rising rents in the city, to concentrate on my painting, to meditate, be in nature, to face my aloneness and my aging. once there, i started working on my memoirs. instead, poems begin pouring out… and continue to pour out… wave after wave of poems. what a blessing.