Cover Photo: Erika Nj Allen
Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Paperback,102 pages
September 16, 2019, ISBN 978-1-936919-66-6
About Matt Hart
Matt Hart is the author of seven books of poems, including most recently Radiant Action and Radiant Companion. Everything Breaking/For Good was released from YesYes Books in September 2019. Hart’s poems, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets online, Big Bell, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Jam Tarts Magazine, jubilat, Kenyon Review online, Lungfull!, and POETRY, among others. After earning his BS in Philosophy from Ball State University in 1992, Hart recorded and toured as lead vocalist for the LOOKOUT! Records band Squirtgun. Their music was featured both on MTV and in the Kevin Smith movie Mallrats. In 2001, Hart earned an MFA in Poetry from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, a 2013 individual artist grant from The Shifting Foundation, 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 (now celebrating its 25th year without a lost-time accident!), he lives in Cincinnati where he is Associate Professor in Creative Writing and the Chair of Liberal Arts at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Currently, he plays guitar and shouts in the band NEVERNEW.
Everything Breaking/For Good by Matt Hart
About Everything Breaking/For Good
The poems in Everything Breaking/For Good swerve through the world as they ache for something better, something that might be but isn’t…at least not yet, and maybe never. Matt Hart’s newest collection asks can a creative life really make it alright? Does imagination make the world? Is paying attention to what’s right in front of our faces the key to empathizing with a universe that isn’t? How do we find our feet with each other when everything seems to be breaking for good? How can we not?
Hart reveals in his skillful sixth book the instability in experiences and interactions with remarkable craftsmanship and command of imagery [and] revels in the impossibility of his own rhetorical situation, suggesting that poetry affords a testing ground for ideas and speculations, and seemingly implausible models of the world around us. This book stands as an accomplished addition to Hart’s innovative body of work.
