A record of what it is like to be alive in this world. It is particular to one man, and his dog, his wife, his daughter, his friends, and a little house in Cincinnati in this century, and in being so faithful to the details of an individual existence, in sounding in minor keys, it is able to resonate in major ones. Where you might expect irony, there is intelligent empathy, where most of us would stop at sadness, Matt Hart persists into wonderment. He isn't feeling or noticing anything any of us haven't felt or noticed before. But his spirit might be extra large, more evolved, his armspan more expansive. He isn't blind to the small and large horrors or sadnesses of our time, but he is still choosing to sing. And the whole thing is a song. -Darcie Dennigan

Wolf Face

Literature & Fiction

HART, MATT

Poetry

H_NGM_N BOOKS

Alexis Orgera's poems perpetually, vitally involve the reconceiveing and reenacting of the means of intimacy even as they say again and again, I can no longer be myself. These are love poems between strangers who may for a moment celebrate and endure recognition; their voice is arch, angelic and at odds with itself, mercurial in its metaphoric riches, captivating in improvisation zeal, beautiful, and impossible not to love. -- Dean Young.

How Like Foreign Objects

Orgera, Alexis

Adam Fell is a break-the-mold original, poet of the strip mall and the lakeshore, bard of Pabst and gas stations and gutted cigarette machines. His brave and quirky poems hum and crackle off the page; they wrangle with the violence in contemporary American society without wavering. They leap and leap without falling, and their incantatory grace is poignant, funny, terrifying, and profound. Erika Meitner “I am the mash'd fireman with breast-bone broken,” wrote Walt Whitman from amid the unsolved arson case of the nineteenth century. Now, from under the charred rubble of a new millennium, Adam Fell calls out to search parties and marauding zombies alike: “I am not a pioneer.” Uncovering a negative poetics of identity – “not” is the operative word throughout this humble and humbling work – Fell alerts us to the fragility of inwardness itself. Through the smoldering embers of ruin, however, we glimpse new forms of ardor. Srikanth Reddy Adam Fell’s I Am Not a Pioneer whispers right up against you and riots in your ear, “Even killing machines have to lick their cubs clean./Even men have to be emptied of their stadiums.” This is the one book of poems you actually need in your backpack. Heartfelt— and breaking—it’s the blueprint for what happens next and forever: bomb shelter, survival manual, a way to stay attached to the people you love. Matt Hart

I Am Not a Pioneer

Fell, Adam

Paul Violi needs to be read (and taught) MORE—with incredible seriousness and with serious delight. He was, hands down, one of our best—most inventive, most adventurous, most original, most resourceful—poets, and he did more than anybody to push the boundaries and expand the possibilities of what poetry could be, while simultaneously reaffirming at every instant exactly what poetry has always been: singing in the service of the infinite. - Matt Hart

In Baltic Circles

Violi, Paul

Vital Pursuits is a companionable, engaging, surprising book-length poem, one that is compassionate, subtly strange, and very present in our time. Its main concerns are mortality and the possibility of connection. While the poetry is conversational and clear, the basic technique is montage: rapid movement from one idea or image or event to another. The purpose, however, is thankfully not merely to dazzle or amuse, but to convey emotional states. Most important is a close attention to the power of single words, how they can be used in one way in a certain sentence and then be repurposed in the next to convey an unexpected, yet related, even dangerous or threatening emotion or thought. This is an impressive debut from a true poet whose future work I will wait for with anticipation. -Matthew Zapruder

Vital Pursuits

Glasson, Evan

Meteoric as pop songs, as fist-fights between best friends, Ben Kopel's poems blaze out like declarations of love and vendetta spray-painted on overpasses. VICTORY is raw and tender as a crying-jag, while being full of a new savagery's swagger and grace. –Dean Young Kiss me in the parking lot says this punk werewolf blade-wielding blankety-blank singing kick-ass ZAP BANG hardcore firefighter Victim #4. Oh my God my friends and & his heart is true and it is populated with wild dogs/ & missing children. All true. As are Kopel's ways he offers us to be with. VICTORY says poetry, says poems may be what we need. Blessings to you, Ben Kopel, for telling us all you do. And one more thing, for giving us the possibility/of a Dixie cup/filled with water/from a Japanese glacier. –Dara Wier When I was a kid my mother said you could name the clouds. REALLY? “Sure Kiddo, go ahead and name them!” I’ve just finished reading Ben Kopel’s new book VICTORY and intend to name these clouds I see today VICTORY BY BEN! My darkness, it expanded // to fill the space provided, like a melody / or a metal rod placed in a loved one. I want to place this book inside you, and I mean that in a nice way. If you don’t understand how to love this book then I don’t know if I’m going to be able to talk to you, ever, again, seriously. --CAConrad

Victory

Kopel, Ben

The poems in this dark and hopeful book evoke a ghostly quality, as if reaching for the ethereal might make the tangible more vital, as if we must always bring along our ghosts.  Strange elements float in this suspension: cake and pliers, dragonflies and faucets, creation and keys.  The hands-on material of these poems rushes forward all at once, lifted and hurled by the sense that the cosmos is a great metaphysical flood.  These are strange compositions, indeed, but they recognize with great force that the world itself is strangely composed. -- Maurice Manning There are many poets who go by the name Laurie Saurborn Young in CARNAVORIA. Some tender, some teasing, some sassy, some will break your heart. All of them impossible to say enough about. Read these poems. Let them offer their means of transport. Patient, quick, gentle, ornery, calm, tough, surprising, loving, fearless and fierce, generous, frank, clear and true. Here is the best inch in view.  -- Dara Wier

Carnavoria

Saurborn Young, Laurie

The letter before A is silence. -- Juan Sweeney from the Translator's Note: Little is known about the life of Juan Sweeney de las Minas de Cobre. He grew up between Andalusia, Ireland, Oklahoma and Bolivia, lived centuries ago and has yet to be born. Vicente Huidobro wrote in a letter to Sweeney, “Reading these poems, one desires annihilation and love in equal measures. One tastes metal, as of an asteroid belt of old trains passing overhead.” Juan Sweeney preferred riding on the backs of trains to being seated inside; he loved cheese and whiskey and has often been compared to the troubadour poet, Cavalcanti, for his lifestyle of travel and intrigues with women of court. He inspired the characterization of Cervantes’ journeyman, Don Quixote, and paradoxically of Byron’s archetypical hero. I found these poems on shreds of paper in the walls of Sweeney Castle in Oklahoma, where I was born and where Sweeney de las Minas de Cobre presumably passed away, though his body soon disappeared from the family crypt.

Wolf's Milk: The Lost Notebooks of Juan Sweeney

Sweeney, Chad

C.S. Carrier’s Mantle hurls, into the whirring gears of history and language, love, mythos, divinity, manifest destiny, genealogy, and faith, the human body becoming a transistor of their writhing currents: “electrons mashed &amp; applied to [the] mouth.” The four sections of this collection deploy mantle – cloak, cerebral cortex, earth stratum – in a prolonged negotiation/interrogation of the past and the bodied experience of it, as Brother Grammar and Brother Testosterone mouth promises and threats: “Here’s your land….And your voice”; “what I wants between her thighs.” This collection, like “a painted canary tagged with a radiotransmitter” signals from the mine, warring, warming, in “the dark fertile / alphabet rarefied.” Marthe Reed C.S. Carrier is a poet of the American Deadpan. That is to say, he carries in his words a long history folding over the silent voices of tomorrow in complex verse. His work contains within it Williams, Myles, Whitman, Dickinson, and Tate. It is also his own voice, gorgeous and wild, stretching forth throughout the plains like the brilliant lands of words he sings to us. Mantle is a book that you must read. Upon reading it, I knew that I was in the midst of a poet who contained multitudes, who with teeth “sore from the alphabet,” in the name of “Conduit,” could make Death grow “whitehot.” These poems are brave and important poems. It is not so much that Carrier is a seer in them, but is a poet who gives language a reason for being a thing at all. Or more to say, Carrier is a poet who makes language matter. These poems matter. Read them. Dorothea Lasky

Mantle

Carrier, C.S.

Caroline Cabrera's FLOOD BLOOM sparks with generosity. We're welcomed into a version of this world that amplifies the one we ordinarily inhabit. Cabrera lets us have magic, she lets us levitate, she gives us a little sleight of hand. These poems are a great, truly melded, mighty mixture of what is seriously impossible to get at, and what moods and manners let us compensate for impossibility; there's wit, scorching intelligence, precision, love of handling words, syntax and sonics; there's heart, compassion, empathy, imagination, invitation. This is an incomparably strong debut. Dara Wier

Flood Bloom

Cabrera, Caroline

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