Matthew Hittinger's Blog

Sally Davies–painter, photographer, and good friend–interviewed me for her new Substack series where I talk a bit about Thought * Frost * Voodoo, my new vis-poems up at Villain Era, and my collection of Masters of the Universe toys.

The QUEENSBOUND project now has a podcast. Each episode features poems from the four editions (2018, 2020, 2021, and 2024) along with MTA broadcasts about the station stops to which the poems correspond. My poem “[G]olden Circe Sips Her Coffee” is in Episode 3.

My friend Charlie‘s got a new lit mag out called Villain Era. Appropriate for the times. He was kind enough to take some work, five visual poems concerned with the interplay of negative white space and black graphics, all composed in spreadsheets. I often use spreadsheets to underpin the page in my work (it gives me greater control on spacing), and started playing with line and cell shades. It felt similar to printmaking.

These are all part of a book project I’ve been working on for almost 20 years called Impossible Gotham. It’s a dual narrative, and one way to indicate speaker was to invert black text on white space to indicate one of the speakers (and the speaker of these poems), the anti-villain Sebastian Kyle (son of Catwoman Selena Kyle in my fanfic mutlti-verse).

Here’s a preview of one of the poems:

It’s better than good, it’s Yule!

It’s publication day for my new chapbook of poems and prints, Thought * Frost * Voodoo. You can order a copy here. Much gratitude to Kristiane and Allison at Harbor Editions for taking such care with bringing this book to life.

I have two poems in the new issue (#31) of Emerge Literary Journal: “The Helicopter * The Heron” (a taste of my new book Thought * Frost * Voodoo), and “Amor at the Armor Manoir“.

Harbor Editions has revealed the cover to my new book, Thought * Frost * Voodoo.

And I received the proof to review:

Excited to share this little ekphrastic/reverse ekphrastic project with you soon!

Foxy holidays!

Animal sibling rivalry – since Monkey was on last year’s Xmas card, Nicholas demanded to be on this year’s!

Happy to announce my chapbook Thought * Frost * Voodoo was selected for publication by Harbor Editions for their 2022 Hybrid Chapbook Open Reading Period. It will be out in 2024 and contains poems accompanied by woodblock and linocut prints.

Head on over to Christal Ann Rice Cooper’s blog for installment #366 of Backstory of the Poem where I answer some questions about “I Am Not a Myth” from my 2017 book The Masque of Marilyn and the new anthology I Wanna Be Loved By You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe.