Books published by Madhat, Inc.

As a series, the poems in Echolocation swing back and forth from the natural world keenly observed-rain, birds, sunflowers, even a clam- to the contortions of the human heart, mostly caused by hurt and loss. And isn't that where the best poetry resides, between the thing and the emotion, the swan and the grief?-BILLY COLLINS

Heresway is a collection of terse poems that riff on certain balances, or rhymes-"here" and "sway" being one among a host of others-composed in the Catskill Mountains, which constitutes their affiliate topography. This book is Sam Truitt's homage to the sun, breath, psyche, etc., and most of all rhyme itself in its broadest sense, and seeks through such enactment to expose in as clear and simple terms as possible our raw human condition- and that nothing is not as it seems. Heresway is the tenth installment of Vertical Elegies, a long-term project the overarching structure and intent of which remains to be seen, though one determination, according to Truitt, is that the "vertical" is down-and from here you can advance a way there now.

For a growing contingent of devotees in the English-speaking world, the brilliant Mexican and Italian literary critic Mario Murgia is a beacon. He reads the great canonical poets, from Dante and Chaucer to Elizabeth Bishop, Borges, and Geoffrey Hill, with freshness and startling insight, joining "distant reading" to the existential phenomenon of cultural distance. A Milton scholar (among many other things), he meditates on the relevance of that austere poet in four languages to a world in which translation has become central. There are new presences as well in this book, poets beyond the canon or on its periphery. -Gordon Teskey,

J.T. Barbarese's poems are a dose of smelling salts in a sleepy, go- along world. The freshness of his language matches perfectly- abets, I should say-the freshness and candor of his world view. Tart and sere, and also witty and generous, True Does Nothing is one of the best books I've read in a long time. I particularly admire his long-lined, long-limbed odes. They are, like all the poems here, exuberantly musical and bracingly less deceived. A brilliant, memorable collection!

Tender, turbulent, witty, elegiac, Quarry Cross is a refreshment to the spirit. Robin Behn shakes out the language to fathom what she calls "the old harms" and "the needy needs"-those very forces that may shatter any of us. She writes of the beauty and potential festering of desire. However serious her subject matter, the marvelous vitality of her voice summons us to the prospect of pleasure. These are bold, mutinous, world-and-word-enchanted poems. -Lee Upton

"I am not the revolution...I am the instrument of another hand." So does Francisco "Pancho" Villa begin the tale of his rise from thief to warlord to the revolutionary leader of northern Mexico. By turns a confession and an act of seduction, The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career chronicles a country remaking itself through blood and violence, giving shape to the boy who would dare to step from anonymity into power through the inexorable force of his will.An exile at 16 after the murder of his family's landowner, Villa begins a journey through dusty desert villages and barren mountaintop camps where his principles are formed and tested by endemic injustice. Building a group of outlaws around him, Villa begins to wage a war on the landowning dons that control the state, but as the savagery increases and the betrayals multiply, the ascension within Villa's command of the mysterious and sadistic Rodolfo Fierro puts Villa's ideals, and his vision of the future of Mexico, to the test.Luminous, disturbing and powerful, The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career weaves history and drama into a driving tale of ambition and brutality, insisting that those who would remake the world must first set fire to the old.

Paul Hoover's The Book of Unnamed Things is a lush exercise in antiphonal parallelisms, a call-and-response of flesh, speech, and world. The accumulation of debts and releases is mapped elegantly onto the reversible cloth of the spoken and unspoken, the written versus the unwritten (and in between, the handwritten, that prodigal alibi). The dialogue here is not so much with ghosts as with the idea of ghosts, the shadows cast in the mind by sensual and philosophical inquiry. "Words unspoken / remain forever old," Hoover asserts. The quiet power of this collection inheres in the accrual of experience, ever-exfoliating and opening continuously into a plain of juxtaposed signification: "the doors are wide open / all is context now."-G.C. Waldrep

In his first fiction collection in many years, Swann has widened his scope to include "short fiction, longer fiction, non-fiction, prose-poems, memoirs, essays etc.," which Harold Jaffe has called "succinct and precisely refined by a poet of a high order writing nuanced prose. One has to read closely and more than once to get the meaning and feel the rhythms," and Andrei Codrescu has said that "Brian Swann has tailored an elegant suit of a variety of threads. It's on my A list of the blooming philosophical hybrids of the last decade." Jackson Lears notes that "Brian Swann's forays into prose-poetry and fiction are venturesome, witty, delightfully understated and frequently compelling," and John Allman writes that "the self discovered in this visionary collection of speculations, narratives and prose-poems will be not only the author's but also the reader's. There is no way to rush through this book. Every page gives you something to ponder or admire, be it theoretical physics or aesthetics or prose poem or something historic, like the rendering of the fin de siècle transition into the post-modern. In many ways we're shown how looking forward is not too different from looking behind, since reality, the world, is non-linear, built on simultaneities. Dogs on the Roof is a thoughtful, exciting companion. Everyone should have a copy nearby."

Volume 2 on published by MadHat Press, Asheville, NC