Advance Reviews
“Take the familiar and make it strange.” (Thus spake short-story story writer Lydia Davis.) This is what poet Matt Hohner has done. Hohner hits the imaginative, intuitive nail on the head again and again in his collection Thresholds. Imagination leaps over time and space: for example, a poem’s two footnotes cite rock supergroup U2 and the second century Chinese poet Lu Chi. Here is poetry for readers who admire intellect that works at gut level. For readers who love poetry. And readers who don’t.”
— Clarinda Harriss, author of The White Rail, a short story collection, 6 poetry collections, and The Innumerable Moons, a collection of poetry and short fiction (forthcoming)
“In a distinct luminous voice, Matt Hohner’s poems are a clairaudient cartography of the silent currents orbiting our lives. These poems map the tragic and profound events and memories that come not just to define us but to propel us toward hope. Charting the stars, the sea floors, the streets of Baltimore, ‘the history raging around us,’ Thresholds will carve its atlas on your heart.”
— Edgar Silex, poet, author of Through All the Displacements and Acts of Love (Northwestern University Press), and Even the Dead Have Memories (New Sins Press)
“The world, and Baltimore in particular, has been waiting for Thresholds for years, and Thresholds has been waiting for us... as friends, relatives, mentors, spouses, teachers, students, neighbors, victims, addicts, killers...as readers.
Matt Hohner’s stunning collection is an immeasurable account of history, landscape, and humanity that is only visible through verse, where wars are simultaneously waged—internally and externally, where loss and love meet in the small ripple of a hidden river, where poetry is as painful as birth.
Thresholds brings us a blueprint made of “simple wooden boats and carts” and “acrid cloudsmoke scraping across an impossible sky,” a place for remembrance, for validation, for mourning, longing, and fear. Here, we are given the chance to cross lines and limits, returning and moving forward, instinctually and unapologetically, toward home.”
— Katherine Cottle, author of three books with Apprentice House Press, I Remain Yours, Halfway, and My Father’s Speech
“In Thresholds, Matt Hohner’s muscular, clear-eyed poems draw a densely textured map: one reads, slipping into the poems’ loci, their creeks and gorges, streets and dark skies. These are poems of deep fidelity: to memory and to place; to past hurts and the scars they’ve left; and to love. Hohner is unafraid of brutal truths: in one poem, the speaker says, of a mother, that he grows “no closer to her now/ than I would to a marble headstone, or a lie.” But the poems do not shrink from the great beauties either, and this is their power. In ‘Saratoga Passage,’ the speaker says, ‘I have known this pulling-to and letting go / I have known the searing white heat of entry into this world alone, / the profound momentary ripples, the lonely stillness that follows.’ The stir, and the stillness, are the gifts these poems give us.”
— Lisa Bickmore, author of Ephemerist (Red Mountain Press) and flicker (Elixir Press)
“Matt Hohner’s Thresholds is an extraordinary collection of poems steeped in an awareness of history and culture and the natural world. With unflinching attention to detail, in a voice both angry and tinged with sadness, the poet decries the horrifying behavior of human beings in the contemporary world. In other poems, he explores the depths of friendship and family, personal loss and longing, and the healing that can best be found in love and nature. Thresholds reminds the reader that only by contemplating darkness can we truly appreciate the light.”
— Bill Jones, poet, author of Swimming at Night (winner of the Artscape 1992 literary award) and At Sunset, Looking East (Apprentice House Press)
Thresholds
and other poems
Thresholds
and other poems
Matt Hohner
Copyright © 2018 by Matthew Hohner
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission from the publisher (except by reviewers who may quote brief passages).
First Edition
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-62720-181-0
E-book ISBN: 978-1-62720-182-7
Printed in the United States of America
Design by Rebecca Dellinger
Marketing by Natalie McDonald
Development by Angela Longhi
Cover photo by Matt Hohner
Back cover author photo by Shannon Kline
Published by Apprentice House
Apprentice House
Loyola University Maryland
4501 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21210
410.617.5265 • 410.617.2198 (fax)
www.apprenticehouse.com [email protected]
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to recognize and thank the original publishers of the following poems:“Dream, July 5, 2006,” The Potomac
“Gulf War Veteran,” Poets Against War and The Potomac
“Under the Leonids,” End of 83
“Terror in the Dust,” September Eleven: Maryland Voices
“Oysters,” Enizagam and winner of 2014 Maryland Writers Association Literary Contest
“Toward Pittsburgh,” “Tornado Warning,” “Noel Aubade,” and “Gut,” Meat for Tea
“Beaver Dam, 1987,” Honorable Mention, 2016 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award Sponsored by the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College, Paterson Literary Review
“Columbia,” District Lit
“Dundee Creek,” Potomac Review
“Dundalk,” Clapboard House
“The Maximum Effective Range,” Lily and finalist in The Lascaux Review 2014 Prize in Poetry
“Psalm 40” and “Cord” Mom Egg Review
“Confirmation,” Truck
“Kevin,” The Five-Two
“Please Refrain from Celebratory Gunfire” and “In Memoriam Annum,” Free State Review
“Ground Rules,” finalist, Earl Weaver Prize, Cobalt
“Pulse,” the light ekphrastic
“May Day,” finalist for the Sow’s Ear Poetry Review 2014 Poetry Prize
“Curfew,” first place, Oberon Poetry Prize, Oberon Poetry Magazine 2016; short-listed, Fish Poetry Prize 2016
“Saratoga Passage, August 2014,” The Moth, short-listed for the Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize and reprinted in The Irish Times; Winner of the 2015 Lascaux Prize in Poetry
“The Last Hours of Summer,” Third Prize, 2014 Maryland Writers Association Literary Contest
“Phantom,” Oberon Poetry Magazine
“When Living Well Isn’t Good Enough, Invite Your Enemies to Dinner,” The Poeming Pigeon
“Saudade: 1983,” Honorable Mention, New Millennium Writings 40th NMW Awards
“GPS,” The Whale Road Review
“To a