Monkey Bars

Matthew Lippman

Typecast Publishing

Imagine touring the grounds of an Agatha Christie English manor with P.G. Wodehouse as your guide, only to find Lon Chaney Jr. wandering the estate. A lively, literary twist on the whodunit, Barking Mad: A Reginald Spiffington Mystery is a unique pastiche of these three traditions, woven together by the cheeky, culinarily-driven playboy protagonist Reginald, who is determined to find the murderer responsible for abruptly ending his luxury weekend at Huffsworthy Hall.

Barking Mad: A Reginald Spiffington Mystery

Jamieson Ridenhour

“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.

Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless

Literature & Fiction

HART, MATT

Poetry

“This Is What They Say introduces us to a poet of intensity and passion who sings against the backdrop of a world we know intimately, but which he has shown to us with new eyes. Dark and humorous, these pieces revel in language as they illuminate with imagery. M. Bartley Seigel is an important poet, writing about a time and a place that matter.” ––Laura Kasischke, author of National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Space, In Chains and The Life Before Her Eyes Michigan's economic boom and bust murmurs like an omen for a now-struggling America in This Is What They Say, as poet M. Bartley Seigel reminds us, “we are all collapsing stars.” If you listen close, you can hear the secret, untold desires, the “ragged, roiling rage” that emanates from the break rooms and abandoned barns of the upper midwest. Here is the honest account of lives where “scars are replaced with more scars.” This is how it feels to grow into adulthood in a first-world wasteland: the slow burn of homemade liquor, the bone-deep ache of a cavity, and the keen of metal against glass. This is the moving and tragic strain that comes between families as they attempt to “clasp arms and dive into this thing together, electric and beautiful as bullets,” and This Is What They Say.

This Is What They Say

Seigel, M. Bartley

This second edition of Amanda Smeltz's inaugural collection of poems contains additional, previously unpublished work. "In Imperial Bender, Amanda Smeltz brings the wildfire. She schemes with rhymes. She buys a round of drinks. She cherishes people and things and life. And when the bomb-dust settles in her branches, it settles the score in all our branches. She is a badass, a poet with moxy, a poet with verve, the new Odysseus, a poet with the sense to take names and rock out. These poems are ferocious with charm, with grace, imperially bent into the heart."  —Matt Hart

Imperial Bender

Smeltz, Amanda