LIGHT-HEADED

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



Matt Hart is the author of two previous books of poetry, Who’s Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006) and Wolf Face (H_NGM_N BKS, 2010), as well as several chapbooks, including collaborations with both Dobby Gibson and Nate Pritts. 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.