Bøger udgivet af Madhat Press

Bill Yarrow is the author of Pointed Sentences (BlazeVOX, 2012) and Incompetent Translations and Inept Haiku (Červená Barva Press, 2013). His poems have appeared in many print and online magazines including Treehouse, Contrary, RHINO, PANK, and DIAGRAM.

"What I've finally come to is to simply live inside mystery, the inexplicable, the impossible-to-be-explained, an impossible-to-exist me living inside an impossible-to-exist universe." --Hugh Fox HUGH BERNARD FOX JR. (1932-2011), born in Chicago, was a writer, novelist, poet and anthropologist and one of the founders (with Ralph Ellison, Anaïs Nin, Paul Bowles, Joyce Carol Oates, Reynolds Price and others) of the Pushcart Prize for literature. He received a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was a professor at Michigan State University in the Department of American Thought and Language from 1968 until his retirement in 1999. He received Fulbright Professsorships at the University of Hermosillo in Mexico in 1961, the Instituto Pedagogico and Universidad Catlica in Caracas from 1964 to 1966, and at the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil from 1978-1980. He met his third wife Maria Bernadete Costa in Brazil in 1978. He studied Latin American literature at the University of Buenos Aires, received an OAS grant and spent a year as an archaeologist in the Atacama Desert in Chile in 1986. He was the founder and Board of Directors member of COSMEP, the International Organization of Independent Publishers, from 1968 until its death in 1996. He was editor of Ghost Dance: The International Quarterly of Experimental Poetry from 1968-1995. He wrote over fifty-four books of poetry, many volumes of short fiction and novels. Hugh's final novel was Reunion, published by Luminis Books in summer 2011. Primate Fox is Hugh's last collection of poems.

Annotator's Note by Tom Bradley At the end of her life, Carol Novack was doing what must eventually be done by everyone who's strong enough: she was squarely facing certain aspects of herself, her family, and her heritage that were not precisely excruciating, but, as she said, were interesting and worthy of painstaking examination. Even before the cancer diagnosis, she was tallying up her life's debits and credits, in particular the wheels and deals with Muter. The penultimate chapter of Felicia s Nose is a confrontation between the eponymous heroine and her female parent, ending with something like a Pandora's box being stashed under a bed. It's unopened, and bursting with what we all know is inside. Being a writer, Carol's method of self-excavation was literary, and she recruited my help, two shovels being better than one. She liked the way I'd glossed Kane X. Faucher's sextuply schizoid impersonations in Epigonesia (BlazeVOX, 2010). That giant book fascinated Carol as the rarity of rarities: a new genre, something like a superficially nonfictional Pale Fire, taking place in real time as the primary text alternately rides roughshod over, and is sapped and subverted by, the critical apparatus. She wanted me to do to her what I did to Kane X. Faucher in Epigonesia: to dig under her characters and situations, to dissect her names, numbers, references, to turn her allusions, both deliberate and unconscious, inside out. Carol wanted a running commentary that furtively pursued she cringed at the word psychoanalytical strategies. She envisaged an infestation of ten-point type skittering along the bottom of her novel like army ants underfoot. "We need a literal subtext!" she cried. The relationship of a novelist with her annotator is a bizarre admixture of banter and intimacy. As we worked, certain passages of her novel began to emit unexpected, sometimes appalling reverberations. But Carol never failed, with surprising courage, to reassure me that we were on track or at least we were groping along an alley in a not-excessively dark and horrendous inner city. Carol died before we could finish Felicia's Nose. In what neither of us knew would be her last chapter, she comes forward and speaks in her own voice for the first time. She shouts encouragement directly down to me, where I toil in cackling paranoia at the bottom of the final page. Carol's thinking about all the strange and possibly happy directions our book will follow next, and she says, "I can't wait to see..." She didn't wait. I'll never know what she saw.

In poem after poem in his excellent, often chilling, often precisely beautiful collection, Soft Water, Charles Scott demonstrates he's the kind of writer for whom authenticity is both an event of "what happened" and the language that is sought and found to render it. He gets things right. From the outset, his book establishes a quality of truth-telling about Vietnam: "After everything had settled, it was quiet/because there were no wounded, /everyone that was hurt/was dead." That he never raises his voice about sensational moments is part of his authority. And his stateside poems, though informed by his Vietnam experience, can be rich and sensuous and tender. A real talent here. -Stephen Dun

"No one can die for us," writes Carolyn Stoloff in her majestic new book of poetry, Ah Wind. But "what wants to save itself sings." Stoloff will be saved. With a touch of Cummings/ Wright/ Merwin, painter-poet Stoloff writes about Duchamp's Selavy, about an "uncluttered time" in Capri, a "Mourning Celebration." She skews romance: "a man walks about with his flame of affection/ for the space of a held breath/ / then love's blown from its wick." She captures the simple with resonance: "before the fish man dies/ / leaving his fresh trout/ in the freezer/ leaving my mind/ still as a white river." But wisdom is what she excels in: "I'd like to be that way-/ in passage, crossing my mother's/ transparent stillness/ leaving no scar." Subtle, perfect poems that plunge toward the inevitable. "Without wounds/can a field be sown?" -Terese Svoboda

"Having just finished reading Corey Mesler's As a Child, I can't think of anything I'd rather do right now than start reading it all over again. The first time, I was smiling all the way through. I felt like the guy in one story who self-medicates by eating a dime and finds his world transformed. These are stories filled with wit and surprise, with heart-busting sadness and romping joy." -Josephine Humphreys "Corey Mesler has unhinged my brain and filled it with words so artfully arranged that they make me want to weep. He blurs the lines between prose and song so that the writer becomes the singer." -Laura Benedict "Wise, raucous, straight-shooting, poignant, funny as all hell, and, at times, brutal and uplifting, the eclectic and electric collection of stories in Corey Mesler's As a Child sucked me in and carried me away from the very first page. The vibrant, real-as-can-be characters and Mesler's economic, evocative prose (my favorite kind) bring to mind that master of the gothic short story, Flannery O'Connor. I would have followed his characters into full-length novels. I certainly plan to follow Mesler into the pages of all his books to come." -Jennifer Niven

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the spaces between Texas and Arkansas, Arkansas and Missouri, Texas and Louisiana. She is the author of two books, Discount Fireworks (Jacaranda Books 2008) and Reading Berryman to the Dog (Jacaranda Books, 2000) and two chapbooks, After Happily Ever After, (2River Chapbook Series, #15) and The Storage of Angels (Slow Water Press, 2008).

There is, as Bob Grumman termed it, the knownstream; then there is the otherstream, a raging subterranean river of literary lava. It bursts through to an unsuspecting public in Warholian, beat, and Dadaesque and Sadean eruptions--a few readers live to tell the tale and the rest never know what hit them. Welcome to Shadows of the Future. Here you have Chris Mansel and his he/she serial killers, Marc Vincenz's Swiss-Chinese eyes, Sheila Murphy ripping zen a new one, C. Brannon Watts with blood in his mouth, mIEKAL aND's Unglish, Annie Pluto's words entwined like lovers, Camille Baco's spare music, Marie-Marcia Casoly's fleshy skeletons, John M. Bennett's muy orthography, Sarah Sarai's mellifluous light, and Joani Reese's evanescence. Carol Novack calls from from the other side and Jack Foley calls from any coast he wants. Jeffrey Side's words looks knowlingly upon the festivities, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen's poems pulse like his recordings, and Susan Lewis's pivots the prose poetics at impossible new angles. And there are more of us, of course, because Otherstream is more, even de trop, or monk minimalist, as it wants. Ask Jake Berry, who rules our online haunts like a happy Pluto handing out inheritances. Yes, we are legion. Like it. Otherstream is where every significant literature was born, midwifed by a writer who asked, looking at a new syntax and/or semantics, how can I write like that, never worrying about the may. Like all poets, but perhaps more extreme, we seek the new perspective, though our sense, sounds, and sentences, broken or not.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of more than two dozen chapbooks and several full-length poetry collections. His poetry has been honored with nomination for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of Net anthology multiple times. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely.

"How can the world be anything but a music made out of what we are, a jagged tune, a knife song, a wild blood and bone aria? In Rob Talbert's energetic, frightening, human, kinetic collection we can hear every note. I want to download this book into the musical score it is and listen to it whenever I'm alone but desperately need the world." -Matthew Dickman "Rob Talbert's Jagged Tune is a gorgeous post-industrial lyric hymn to minimum-wage jobs: from corrections officer to pawn shop employee to cruise ship attendant to insurance certificate specialist to retail clerk to unemployed and back again, Talbert's poems-hewn from life experience-contrast the constraints of work with the ecstasy of nightclubs, their "feral engine" and "deep recess of liquor techno." "My life depends on night," he writes, and this is a nocturnal book that embraces the wonder of darkness, its broken song. I am awed by these poems-their unyielding eye, their deft music, their capacity for wisdom, and all the ways in which they illuminate facets of the American experience that we rarely see." -Erika Meitner