Books published by Madhat, Inc.

Born into a wealthy Boston banking family, the nephew of J. P. Morgan, Harry Crosby was the very embodiment of flaming youth in the Roaring Twenties. A recipient of the Croix de Guerre for heroism in the American Ambulance Corps in World War One, he sustained trauma that fueled his extravagant and restlessly experimental expatriate lifestyle with his wife Caresse in Paris, before taking his life and that of his mistress in a notorious double suicide in a New York City hotel room in 1929. The Crosbys'' Black Sun Press was famed for its elegantly designed limited editions, publishing first editions of important works of modernism, including Hart Crane''s The Bridge, and the first excerpts of Joyce''s Work-In-Progress to appear in book form. Crosby''s own poetry has been little seen since its original publication in books by the Black Sun Press, the last of which appeared in 1931. Now acclaimed editor and poet Ben Mazer has brought together all of Crosby''s contemporary magazine and anthology appearances, as well as drawing on poems from five of Crosby''s collections, to present the first authorized edition of Crosby''s poems to appear in book form since 1931.

Surrealism, vivid imagery, and spare language draw on tradition to forge a new species of contemporary fairy tale in these poems about love and its demise, family, and identity. Bicher’s language is brilliantly spare, and her images are precisely and vividly cut, but pain is the whetstone that hones her lines to their keen, sometimes near-lethal edge....

The poems in Hue & Cry, Martin’s second poetry collection, explore the world of art—what inspires creativity? what does genius mean? what awakens the imagination? who decides who is an artist? But these poems are also about the art of living in the world. In particular, the dozen poems in the voices of Picasso’s lovers, wives, mistresses, and friends portray women as creators, subjects, and muses against the backdrop of the entire twentieth century.

From athletic events to family portraits to celebrations of historic scenes, Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery speaks with the stately music of complex witness....The drama of these poems is to convert physical life to words without losing touch with physical life.

Michelson traveled for extended stays to Finland, Sri Lanka and China. In poems from these ventures, the narrator’s aggressive, appetitive stance and roiling language is replaced by the more narrative, less self-reflexive language of the witness. This is especially true of the Sri Lanka poems, which represent both the visitor’s wonder at an exotic, tropic world and the explicit terrors of trying to negotiate a police state under siege by violent insurgents. Michelson is at all times acutely aware of the politics in which his poetry operates.

In Scott Withiam’s Doors Out of the Underworld, marvelous things occur: a pear talks to a man and a woman talks to a book. German restaurants dissolve into empty lots and surf clams teach life lessons. His magic touch shines a stark beam into our lives which illuminates both the pains and pleasures of growing older, of discovering more than we knew was there or perhaps wanted to know....—John Skoyles

'3.3 billion years ago we caught a break . . .' So states the first line of Christopher Buckley's new poetry collection Chaos Theory, setting the tone of casual erudition, an atomic fusion of the personal and the cosmic. The book's theme is a perennial one: Chaos Theory is really about finding the underlying order in apparently random data. True to his word, Buckley gives us "Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko Bop" by Little Anthony & The Imperials: - '… particles; the cathedral of the atom, and Gunsmoke, The Whistler, Mr. & Mrs. North- / zooming past / the cosmic street lamps,' bids us make the connections along with him. It's a startling, deliriously pleasurable enterprise, poem by poem. As we reach the end of our cosmic journey through Chaos Theory, we feel like one of the imagined aliens huddled at last around Voyager's Golden Records on some distant planet, understanding dawning in her eye or ear, as an x-ray of a human hand and snowflakes over Sequoia appear on a hologram, followed by a recording of the greeting "May all be well" in Ancient Sumerian and the brainwaves of Ann Druyan considering human violence and poverty and falling in love.

Under the Music is cause for celebration, as it gathers over forty years of Maxine Chernoff's brilliant exploration of a single form: the prose poem. Her pieces abound in witty dialogue, absurdist jokes, sage advice, and a gallery of eccentric characters like "The Man Struck Twenty Times by Lightning," or "The Woman Who Straddled the Globe."

Every age demands its own mythos. Thilleman creates a thoroughly contemporary mythology of consciousness which names the unnameables so that they might carry us from "Descent" all the way through chaos upon chaos, morass and vision to "what is to be known now."Like William Blake, Thilleman creates a language not grammatical or ordinary, not a language merely of thinking, but a primal language rooted in the poetic of his own body, and thus this universal body we all share with this earth.

Driven is a travelogue in which the narrator reviews his life in the course of twenty four hours. A professor at a small college hopes for something different to happen on the last day of the academic year. And it does. When he leaves his home on Cape Cod for Boston where he teaches, he enters a world both real and imaginary. Two of his passengers are his dead parents. The third is the love of his life from years ago. He navigates issues of loss, class, fame and family as he passes familiar landmarks, stops at the same coffee shops, recalls the dance at the dump, the stories of barflies and entrepreneurs, eccentric colleagues and his newfound sobriety. Is it fiction or nonfiction? That depends on whether or not you believe in ghosts.

American culture is strange-and appears even stranger after a hiatus. Cue Everett, back in Chicagoland after living in China. His father has just died, and re-entry to his former life is increasingly complicated. On top of that, while he was abroad everyone Everett cared about dove off the deep end. Exhibit A: Everett's mom, recently widowed, with a newfound faith in healing crystals and a ponytailed guru. Exhibit B: former roommate Dino's newly ascetic lifestyle. Increasingly drifting and desperate, Everett signs on to an unconventional venture: the high-stakes world of mushroom smuggling.Do the ends justify the means? What, even, are the ends? Eastbound into the Cosmos is the story of Everett's attempt to process the longing, the grief, the weirdness. Along the way he discovers the weird in himself, which may just be what ultimately frees him.

Tim Suermondt's fifth full-length book of verse, Josephine Baker Swimming Pool, is one you should keep by your bedside to dive into just before turning off your light-for its companionable tone, for its clarity and surprising imagery, for the sweet quietude of these many meditations.

Michael Anania's Nightsongs & Clamors is filled with the music of night and the cacophony of days. It is as if the poet's mind is a river punctuated by moments in time, and those moments gathered together pulsate in every poem.

Sally Connolly has a sharp ear for how poetry sounds, for where it originates and where it ends up, and she's in a good position to say, not just thanks to her knowledge of things Irish and Irish English and British English and American, but thanks to her knowledge about the guts of poems: past and present, early-career and deeply canonical, out-there and close to the heart, outspoken and close to the vest, get attention in Connolly's personal, thoughtful, pellucid language. The Anglophone world needs more poetry critics so careful, so thoughtful, so able to speak their minds.-Stephanie Burt

"This is a book of amazing range. Dennis Maloney is equally at home with ancient Japanese forms and the memory of hearing Janis Joplin at the Fillmore. Moving with confidence among continents and centuries, the poems have an uncanny immediacy that makes us feel as if the voice is always right here, right now. As one of our most accomplished translators, Maloney seems to have mastered the art of being invisible, so that his poems sing their human songs untethered from any particular autobiography, though they dip in and out of many. In this sense the book has multiple voices, all of which speak with the gravitas of age and experiencewhile somehow preserving an arresting freshness of vision. Easy of access, playful, profound, surprising, and often quietly heartbreaking, The Things I Notice Now is the work of a poet writing at the height of his powers."-Chase Twichell

John Donne wrote, "Death be not proud, though some have called you mighty and dreadful; thou are not so." In LET US NOW SPEAK OF EXTINCTION, death is mighty and proud, but while it is frequently a source of bemusement, it is also one of extraordinary amusement in the hands of an accomplished fabulist and allegorist the likes of Michael C. Keith. Indeed, this unconventional collection of short fiction might just as easily be titled LET US NOW SPEAK OF THE HUMAN CONDITION IN ALL OF ITS DIVERGENT MANIFESTATIONS, because that is its essential subject. Keith's new work probes the full range of emotions and behavior and redefines the term dark humor in the process.

Be warned! The far-ranging notes and essays of Sweet Marjoram are addictive. Once I began reading, I couldn't stop. I wanted more of Henry's wit and wisdom, his dazzling, surprising juxtapositions. I wanted to see him keep making the familiar new, and the strange familiar. Whether he's writing about folly or time or food or meat or envy or appetite, Henry has a gift for making his reader see the world afresh. A delightful and highly original collection.-Margot Livesey

Peter Johnson has long been acclaimed by such poets as Russell Edson and Charles Simic as one of the masters of the prose poem. In his new book, Old Man Howling at the Moon, he continues his exploration of the genre, exhibiting his usual comic touch. Johnson calls these new poems "complaints" and traces his influences back to fourteenth-century France, while pointing out in the preface that his wise-fool Grumpy Old Everyman is also very much a part of a tradition, including writers as diverse as Allen Ginsberg, Catullus, and Nicanor Parra. Old Man Howling at the Moon is a welcome arrival at a time when anger and satire are desperately needed to enliven a contemporary poetry scene where often fashionable irony reigns supreme.

Delightfully playful, Alexander Dickow's newest collection of poetry- Appetites-is a feast for all. Readers ravenous for Dickow's former strengths of attention to the sounds, puns and turns of language (the "crabbed utterings [that] / Topple our blurred lips out") will find themselves satiated. But the cherry on the top is a witty spice spooned heftily into the mix: Dickow's humorous tug of war between the archaic, arcane and the ultramodern (recalling explorations by Lisa Jarnot). This is "tall verbiage", as he writes in "Beverage", which readers are certain to drink in with relish. A¿ table! -Jennifer K. Dick

The Body of the World is a full-body missive, a reckoning.... In this volume, Easter addresses her burgeoning body, as well as the world's body.... She addresses slights and offenses--she dances, leaving no proverbial stone unturned. In her trek, she outlines her personal and familial lineage, giving readers a better understanding of how she has evolved and gained tools to battle racial wrongs with fiery grace. With her particular stance and strut, Easter marks this weighted terrain. We follow. We bear witness, as she uplifts and reckons.... As Easter stretches and widens her reach, she expands the margins--she bids us, in these upending times--to do the same.- Glenis Redmond, author of What My Hand Say