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Light-Headed
Poetry. "In Matt Hart's poetry, crackling diction and soulful exuberance take the wheel for a happily bent ride through waking and dreaming spaces. Hart works the contours of his chosen forms with precision and humor, and emphasizes reoccurrence as poetic value and material dynamic through which to channel further depths of possibility for the imagination"--Anselm Berrigan. "Hart's boisterous formal play recalls the work of other bravely errant iterants: Teds Berrigan and Greenwald; Lyn Hejinian; and Swinburne (if he got lost in Cincinnati in the 00s). Verse versus reverb makes for dazzlingly interlocking structures, sweet, urgent and local as difficulty. 'Press playpen'!"--Catherine Wagner.
- GenresPoetry
110 pages, Paperback
First published March 14, 2011
2 people are currently reading
32 people want to read
About the author
Matt Hart
54 books43 followersMatt Hart’s books include FAMILIAR (Pickpocket Books, 2022), Everything Breaking/For Good (YesYes Books, 2019), and The Obliterations (Pickpocket Books, 2019). His poems, reviews, and essays have been published in journals including American Poetry Review, Conduit, jubilat, The Kenyon Review, and Lungfull!, among others. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, a grant from The Shifting Foundation, and fellowships from both the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
Hart was a cofounder and the editor in chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety from 1994–2019. A faculty mentor in the PNCA/Willamette University Low-Residency Creative Writing MFA Program and the head of creative writing at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, he has also been a visiting writer/professor at both the Vermont Studio Center and the University of Texas at Austin. Hart’s music has been featured on MTV and in major motion pictures, including Kevin Smith’s Mallrats. He plays in the post-punk/indie rock bands TRAVEL and NEVERNEW.
Older bio:
Matt Hart is the author of four books of poems, Who's Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006), Wolf Face (H_NGM_N BKS, 2010), Light-Headed (BlazeVOX, 2011), and Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless (Typecast Publishing, 2012), as well as several chapbooks. A fifth collection, Debacle Debacle, is forthcoming from H_NGM_N BKS in 2013. Additionally, his poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Big Bell, Cincinnati Review, Coldfront, Columbia Poetry Review, H_NGM_N, Harvard Review, jubilat, Lungfull!, and Post Road, among others. His awards include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from both the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and plays in the band TRAVEL. This fall he will be a Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Texas, Austin.
Hart was a cofounder and the editor in chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety from 1994–2019. A faculty mentor in the PNCA/Willamette University Low-Residency Creative Writing MFA Program and the head of creative writing at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, he has also been a visiting writer/professor at both the Vermont Studio Center and the University of Texas at Austin. Hart’s music has been featured on MTV and in major motion pictures, including Kevin Smith’s Mallrats. He plays in the post-punk/indie rock bands TRAVEL and NEVERNEW.
Older bio:
Matt Hart is the author of four books of poems, Who's Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006), Wolf Face (H_NGM_N BKS, 2010), Light-Headed (BlazeVOX, 2011), and Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless (Typecast Publishing, 2012), as well as several chapbooks. A fifth collection, Debacle Debacle, is forthcoming from H_NGM_N BKS in 2013. Additionally, his poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Big Bell, Cincinnati Review, Coldfront, Columbia Poetry Review, H_NGM_N, Harvard Review, jubilat, Lungfull!, and Post Road, among others. His awards include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from both the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and plays in the band TRAVEL. This fall he will be a Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Texas, Austin.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 11, 2013
“Living in Cincinnati means rapture”
Light-Headed is one of Matt Hart’s most concentrated effort yet. He proves himself a versatile and imaginative formalist, his own innate, absurd energy finding forms, civilizing them, then busting their seams. Hart’s forte is an avalanche of musical anxiety that leads to a childlike, if consciously imagined, crystallization of hope. But much about this sequence of poems also involves ominous endings and flares of hard perspective. In the long poem “All the Hours We’re Awake,” the poem title serves as almost singsong regular refrain; in between, Hart blends jagged sonic and mental associations with great agility. The poem concludes:
You wheeze and you grope.
You butterfly knife off the high board,
but praying. Where is my past life
to save me the most? The future
of damaging yellow-cake
uranium. I knew it, said the crocodile
harvesting egg yolks.
Peace is a difficult baby.
Light-Headed is one of Matt Hart’s most concentrated effort yet. He proves himself a versatile and imaginative formalist, his own innate, absurd energy finding forms, civilizing them, then busting their seams. Hart’s forte is an avalanche of musical anxiety that leads to a childlike, if consciously imagined, crystallization of hope. But much about this sequence of poems also involves ominous endings and flares of hard perspective. In the long poem “All the Hours We’re Awake,” the poem title serves as almost singsong regular refrain; in between, Hart blends jagged sonic and mental associations with great agility. The poem concludes:
You wheeze and you grope.
You butterfly knife off the high board,
but praying. Where is my past life
to save me the most? The future
of damaging yellow-cake
uranium. I knew it, said the crocodile
harvesting egg yolks.
Peace is a difficult baby.
August 2, 2021
Matt Hart's poems read like prophecy, and this collection is no exception. Each poem examines a physical as well as emotional state of being, sometimes blending the two until you're not sure which one you're reading about. It's a stunning way of capturing the ways in which the lines between interiority and exteriority can blur as we move through ordinary life. It's a literal manifestation of being light-headed, as well as searching for a way to clear the fog.
Hart's way with words is, as always, a marvel. His descriptions, his digesting of physical and emotional space, are vivid and palpable. "I have a hangover the size of your typist. / I have a dream of three oranges / a metal detector / a burst of young blood in my morning of frost" (pg 22). But even as the descriptions jump off the page and transplant you in a time and place completely disorienting, you never lose the sense that you're exactly where the speaker wants you to be.
This is why this book feels like prophecy, like philosophy in motion. There's a spiritual reverence for the ordinary, for the everyday ins and outs of life, that tastes like a cup of tea or a pint of beer. It feels so familiar, so typical, and yet the more I read, the more questions came to my mind. "The blue water blue in relation / to the heavens, which echo / without being, and so blown / out of proportion" (pg 13). "Sometimes a scream is better / than a thesis" (pg 41). There's an honesty in this pages, something raw and gnawing that dives into the internal world of the speaker and lets us sink to the bottom. It's an immense act of openness, of vulnerability.
Hart's way with words is, as always, a marvel. His descriptions, his digesting of physical and emotional space, are vivid and palpable. "I have a hangover the size of your typist. / I have a dream of three oranges / a metal detector / a burst of young blood in my morning of frost" (pg 22). But even as the descriptions jump off the page and transplant you in a time and place completely disorienting, you never lose the sense that you're exactly where the speaker wants you to be.
This is why this book feels like prophecy, like philosophy in motion. There's a spiritual reverence for the ordinary, for the everyday ins and outs of life, that tastes like a cup of tea or a pint of beer. It feels so familiar, so typical, and yet the more I read, the more questions came to my mind. "The blue water blue in relation / to the heavens, which echo / without being, and so blown / out of proportion" (pg 13). "Sometimes a scream is better / than a thesis" (pg 41). There's an honesty in this pages, something raw and gnawing that dives into the internal world of the speaker and lets us sink to the bottom. It's an immense act of openness, of vulnerability.
June 7, 2011
so ridiculously good. tight packed, energetic, ADD yet thoughtful and caring and full of love. dude is a monster. go see him read in person, totally worth it every time.
gotta read it again and digest more. varied in form, diverse in content, integrative of personal/universal.
gotta read it again and digest more. varied in form, diverse in content, integrative of personal/universal.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews