Slab Phase

by Matt Turner

Trying to give up coffee, I discovered that reading poems by Matt Turner first thing in the morning gives me a more piquant and durable high. The repetitions and variations, the sleight-of-sound, the sudden emotional pledges, the stepped intellection— all this compacted into quick bolts of sound, energy, thought and feeling. Turner’s stanzas are like voltaic charges. The ambiguity between expanding recursive phrases and independent fragments creates the kind of doubling, breaking, and recombining of meanings that we might call mitotic. There it is, the Matt Turner School of Mitotic Poetics. In session! —Forrest Gander These are worlds that float as microscopic filaments alive as micro-engravings kinetic with migrational telepathy as they glisten with their own dictation. An endemic domain not unlike primordial grammar that dictates protracted simplicity. — Will Alexander Matt Turner (b. 1974) is the author of the full poetry collections Wave 9: Collages (Flying Islands, 2020) and Not Moving (Broken Sleep, 2019), and the chapbooks Be Your Dog (The Economy, 2022) and the eponymously titled Matt Turner (CONC, 2010). He is the translator of Weeds, by Lu Xun (Seaweed Salad Editions, 2019), and co-translator, with Weng Haiying, of Berlin Reflections (DAAD, 2022) and 1000 Poems of 1000 Elephants (Subjam, 2019), both by Yan Jun, and work by Ou Ning, Mi Jialu, Hu Jiujiu and others. He lives in New York City, where he works as a freelance translator and copy editor.

136 pages, Paperback

Published April 28, 2022