"I woke up / this morning to a world cataclysmic / in the ordinary ways." And this world in Matt Hart's Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless operates in stereo. In its right speaker: the melody of a male vocalist who feels literally beside himself, constantly observing each of life's interactions while also ferociously experiencing them, yelling Emerson and Whitman and Kant into the mic. In the left blares the bass lines of Jawbreaker, Alice Cooper, and the yawps of Patti Smith. "One can't be out-of-control-in control," writes Hart, and with a righteous blending of pulpit fervor and mosh pit frenzy, these poems feed upon the friction of life's contradictions and our hunger for absolutes, setting up the reader to discover "nothing is perfectly nailed to the wall." Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless is an epic call for magnificence and truth from a remarkable poet at his finest.

Author Biography

Matt Hart is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Who's Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006), Wolf Face (H_NGM_N BKS, 2010), and LIGHT-HEADED (BlazeVOX, 2011), and several chapbooks. His poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in The Awl, Big Bell, Coldfront, Gulf Coast, H_NGM_N, Harvard Review, jubilat, and The Lumberyard, among many others. Hart is a recipient of fellowships from both the Breadloaf Writers' Conference and The Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. A longtime musician, he currently also plays in the poetry/noise band Travel. Music from his previous musical projects has appeared on MTV and in major motion pictures, including Kevin Smith's Mallrats. In 2011, he co-edited the reissue of the late Paul Violi's first major collection of poems, In Baltic Circles, for the H_NGM_N BKS Reissue Series. 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.