Debacle Debacle

by Matt Hart

Matt Hart's DEBACLE DEBACLE has a burning domesticity, an anxiousness. It is a dream of one's family in danger, and a waking from that dream to make waffles and bacon for them. It really really LOVES the world, and hates it too. It should. Vastly different than Hart's previous collections, DEBACLE DEBACLE is a book of quiet political and personal decision.—Adam Fell

Genres: Poetry

102 pages, Paperback

First published May 7, 2013

About the author

Matt 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.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Should've been called Debacle/ Debacle, for the way that slash shows up in some many of the poems, and the way it turns the traditional Matt Hart poem, inclusive as Whitman, into a strange either-or proposition, as if to say in this universe, you've got to choose: do you want debacle or debacle.

Otherwise, good poems here.

[Biscuits · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Matt Hart with his front door wide-open, his foot propped up. The energy you're expecting comes in a different shape and color. Hart is finally telling the stories, of his daughter and his wife, his brother in poetry and all the things he has been shredding about for years. There's a change here that is shocking. I bet you'll like it.

[Matthew David Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book of poems. There isn't a book that has moved me emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually more than Debacle Debacle in quite some time. Even more pleasing is finding a venue to witness Matt Hart expose his innards to the crowd. I look forward to his other collections.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fairly easily accessible, carefully intimate book of poems. I've enjoyed Matt Hart since Wolf Face, and this one didn't disappoint.

[lyraand]

"It comes as no surprise then: what's beautiful
is always both crash site and landing, memorial
and monument, lighthouse and warning. The sense
of our senses both exuberant and dire."

[Laban · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's unfortunate that Hart couldn't move past his seeming delight with constructing a surprising phrase or line through the same rhetorical technique over and over again to cobble together a deeper and more nuanced whole. The poems hit the same emotional note over and over again without truly exploring the density of experience.