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Radiant Companion
RADIANT COMPANION is the one in the many, the spirit right beside you, the roar you can count on to lead you out of darkness. And as the companion volume to Matt Hart's book-length serial poem, Radiant Action, it's also an address book (the ones who matter most)—a constellation of singers, of hands to hold, the community of collaboration(s) that makes the action—any action—possible. These poems flash and bang with human defiance against death in all its disguises. Togetherness changes everything, impossibly so.
"Simultaneously playful and poignant with tons of linguistic precision, the emotional urgency that informs Matt Hart's writing in RADIANT COMPANION raises the stakes for the reader—he is just that good. Hart, like his predecessors James Tate and Dean Young (to name two), is poised to take his place as one of America's boldest, most major poets."—Noelle Kocot
"In Matt Hart's RADIANT COMPANION, echoes of poetry past merge with a present that transcends its misfortunes, leaving readers with a newfound love of the blessed ordinary: blue winter sky, raw cotton, a billion starry skulls. 'The word is pain, / and the world is pain, / but the sun on our skin / is enormous and light,' proclaims Hart's Poem with a Chorus by Jawbreaker, one of many moments where this collection provides vital insight into contemporary life. RADIANT COMPANION rewrites the parameters of the pastoral and shows us where the ghost of John Keats lingers, as a punk rock heart hammers away in our chests."—Mary Biddinger
"Simultaneously playful and poignant with tons of linguistic precision, the emotional urgency that informs Matt Hart's writing in RADIANT COMPANION raises the stakes for the reader—he is just that good. Hart, like his predecessors James Tate and Dean Young (to name two), is poised to take his place as one of America's boldest, most major poets."—Noelle Kocot
"In Matt Hart's RADIANT COMPANION, echoes of poetry past merge with a present that transcends its misfortunes, leaving readers with a newfound love of the blessed ordinary: blue winter sky, raw cotton, a billion starry skulls. 'The word is pain, / and the world is pain, / but the sun on our skin / is enormous and light,' proclaims Hart's Poem with a Chorus by Jawbreaker, one of many moments where this collection provides vital insight into contemporary life. RADIANT COMPANION rewrites the parameters of the pastoral and shows us where the ghost of John Keats lingers, as a punk rock heart hammers away in our chests."—Mary Biddinger
- GenresPoetry
140 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2016
About the author
Matt Hart
58 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 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 15, 2016
Radiant Companion is, to my mind, one of the finest collections of poetry published this year. Do yourself a favor and pick it up.
May 31, 2019
Love held in a palm and love set down for a better look and love asked to explain itself and love explained.
October 5, 2016
By now, one of your friends has shared a social media meme with lines from the Leonard Cohen song “Anthem” that goes like this: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
The poems in Matt Hart’s latest two collections, Radiant Action (H_NGM_N Books) and Radiant Companion (Monster House Press), crack open language and spill light on the page. They radiate a galactic sense of warmth and well-being in response to the ever-fucked-up-ness of the world. And aren’t we hungry for art that reacts to hate and violence with love and light? Radiant Action and Radiant Companion are this historical moment’s necessary carnal communion, songs of self that blossom into melodies of every body: “this body—mine and yours, which is the same body” (68 RC); “My veins with your veins, my noise with your noise” (81).
If you were my freshmen composition students, I would explain it in this way: Radiant Action lays out a kind of thesis for Hart’s aesthetic: “the fires of Truth are the birds we dance and sing”; “Today is the day / I’ll attempt to make sense”; “I wanna get high into. . . / the poetic riddle” (11; 13; 82 RA). The poems in Radiant Companion, then, provide the lyric examples of that visionary poetic argument. However, few categories or boundaries remain stable when applied to Matt Hart’s work, given its Blakean contraries and Whitmanian abundancies. In fact, in one of his poems, Hart unshyly shares Emerson’s suggestion that “sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.” And since you are not (most likely) my freshman composition students anyway, I will explain it like this: the book Radiant Action is the poet “screaming screaming screaming an ocean into being” (48 RA). Perhaps then, what distinguishes Radiant Companion from the latter is that it offers a direct and sustained call to the reader to take up the important work of channeling the ecstatic present by writing radiantly, the work of making our own “transformative music”: “I’m writing to tell you / you have to keep it up—the dailiness / and simplicity, the astonishment and love” (9 RC). “Thank you,” Hart tells us in advance, “for dreaming and squawking / and daring” (74 RC).
Among so much intertexual playfulness in these two collections is an aesthetic that challenges William Carlos Williams’ edict that there are “no ideas but in things.” Hart’s poetry shows this is not an exclusionary proposition, that one can have both ideas and things and that the interplay between them is how art helps us to keep living. He crafts a tension between abstract thought and the concrete details of daily life. In doing so, he produces lines that are full of linguistic surprises: “I want words to be matches / or not to be at all, to burn us up from the inside / outlandish, which is a desire” (76 RC). Matt Hart’s verse is rough-beast awake and slouching.
Heart-son of Whitman, punk oracle to the ghost of Keats—Matt Hart is a wild-haired Orion. This body of work is his flaming arrow shot into the castle’s keep. Let us join his rapturous wondering, his starlit wandering, his luminous siege.
The poems in Matt Hart’s latest two collections, Radiant Action (H_NGM_N Books) and Radiant Companion (Monster House Press), crack open language and spill light on the page. They radiate a galactic sense of warmth and well-being in response to the ever-fucked-up-ness of the world. And aren’t we hungry for art that reacts to hate and violence with love and light? Radiant Action and Radiant Companion are this historical moment’s necessary carnal communion, songs of self that blossom into melodies of every body: “this body—mine and yours, which is the same body” (68 RC); “My veins with your veins, my noise with your noise” (81).
If you were my freshmen composition students, I would explain it in this way: Radiant Action lays out a kind of thesis for Hart’s aesthetic: “the fires of Truth are the birds we dance and sing”; “Today is the day / I’ll attempt to make sense”; “I wanna get high into. . . / the poetic riddle” (11; 13; 82 RA). The poems in Radiant Companion, then, provide the lyric examples of that visionary poetic argument. However, few categories or boundaries remain stable when applied to Matt Hart’s work, given its Blakean contraries and Whitmanian abundancies. In fact, in one of his poems, Hart unshyly shares Emerson’s suggestion that “sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.” And since you are not (most likely) my freshman composition students anyway, I will explain it like this: the book Radiant Action is the poet “screaming screaming screaming an ocean into being” (48 RA). Perhaps then, what distinguishes Radiant Companion from the latter is that it offers a direct and sustained call to the reader to take up the important work of channeling the ecstatic present by writing radiantly, the work of making our own “transformative music”: “I’m writing to tell you / you have to keep it up—the dailiness / and simplicity, the astonishment and love” (9 RC). “Thank you,” Hart tells us in advance, “for dreaming and squawking / and daring” (74 RC).
Among so much intertexual playfulness in these two collections is an aesthetic that challenges William Carlos Williams’ edict that there are “no ideas but in things.” Hart’s poetry shows this is not an exclusionary proposition, that one can have both ideas and things and that the interplay between them is how art helps us to keep living. He crafts a tension between abstract thought and the concrete details of daily life. In doing so, he produces lines that are full of linguistic surprises: “I want words to be matches / or not to be at all, to burn us up from the inside / outlandish, which is a desire” (76 RC). Matt Hart’s verse is rough-beast awake and slouching.
Heart-son of Whitman, punk oracle to the ghost of Keats—Matt Hart is a wild-haired Orion. This body of work is his flaming arrow shot into the castle’s keep. Let us join his rapturous wondering, his starlit wandering, his luminous siege.
September 27, 2016
Let me preface with the fact that poetry is not a genre with which I am confident or knowledgeable. I do, however feel that the poetry I enjoy acts as ignition to something within. Perhaps (and hopefully) that's a major element to the poetic world.
Mr Hart's collection --a companion to his novella-length poem, Radiant Action-- was a welcome and rewarding challenge. He is able to be weary and furious about the darkness that stains the world, and genuinely heartfelt about the light with which we are all capable. It felt like I was noticing a kind, quiet man in the center of a loud basement punk show. I intend to read more of Mr Hart's work
Mr Hart's collection --a companion to his novella-length poem, Radiant Action-- was a welcome and rewarding challenge. He is able to be weary and furious about the darkness that stains the world, and genuinely heartfelt about the light with which we are all capable. It felt like I was noticing a kind, quiet man in the center of a loud basement punk show. I intend to read more of Mr Hart's work
December 13, 2016
These poems are meant to be read out loud. When you verbalize them they jump off the paper and come alive.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews