Books by Matt Betts

Not everyone lands their dream job.Take Abe: He's bottomed out as an Imaginary Friend and has to find a new job before his bosses assign him a truly crappy one. Just as he's about to resign himself to a life of making toys in a workshop, he's given a reprieve-of sorts. Now he has the opportunity to be the first policeman on the Hill and solve an impossible murder.For assistance he ropes in his career counselor, a Bigfoot, and his best friend, a Boogeyman. The job requires him to talk to Tooth Fairies, Leprechauns, Yetis and everything else humanity has dreamt up over the years. None of them offer any clues, but since Abe's supervisors are Mother Nature, Father Time and Death, he can't just give up and walk away.Dream job? Dream on.

Poet. Pirate. It's all the same really. They both pillage, plunder, drink rum, look for treasure, and sometimes, after too many drinks, they're known to throw a right hook or two. But that's the beauty of poetry and piracy-it's unhinged, a stream of emotions that make you laugh, cry, bleed, bruise, and eat oranges to prevent scurvy. It's an adventure. It's feeling the wind on your face from the sea or the page. It's tasting the salt in the ocean or in your tears. But most importantly, it's the experience of getting from one port to another, one page to the next, killing one more siren and murdering just one more darling. You see, piracy is about rules, and the number one rule is that there are no rules. Pirate-poets live for the journey, they do what has to be done to survive, and hope that karma, or a Kraken, doesn't come around and bite them in the arse. Poetry is like that, too. It's a fleeting moment, an image, that the writer is hoping will leave you breathless, bruised, and stranded on an island. Underwater Fistfight does just that, because Matt Betts is a pirate-poet who takes science fiction and throws it in the brig with horror while he sits outside the cell, laughing as they duke it out. He's a regular Davy Jones, a sailor's devil, claiming the lives of these poems and dragging them down to the locker to dissect, inspect, and sift through their stories and characters like plunder.