Books published by Madhat, Inc.

The poet Mark Scroggins has long been known as a leading authority on Louis Zukofsky, a prolific reviewer and critic, and the author of a series of authoritative essays on the history of twentieth-century poetry. The Mathematical Sublime presents a selection of Scroggins's reviews, short essays, and weblog posts about a dazzling variety of poets, poems, and poetry criticism: from Andrew Marvell to Rae Armantrout, Beowulf to Ronald Johnson, from the high modernists to Language Poetry and the contemporary avant-garde. Scroggins expores the varieties of poetic form, the interplay of the personal and the political in poets' and critics' rhetoric, the role of race and gender in the writing and reception of poetry, and the sometimes maddening squabbles that make up the poetry "scene." Along the way he writes about "hauntology" in popular music, occultism among the modernists, the relationship of poem-making and gardening, and his own sense of almost paralyzed awe at the rich and overwhelming plenitude of poetry that has been written over the past century. In Robert Archambeau's words, "Fluent, honest, and undeceivable, Mark Scroggins is just what a critic ought to be."

"Sturgeon illuminates the otherwise transparent impressions of memory and conscience, those opaque connections between our imaginations and each other, in music that sharpens the verse with thrilling uncertainty. His poems impress themselves upon the mind like an iron. He may be the first major poet of this generation." -Daniel Pritchard, editor of The Critical Flame

Into Nancy Mitchell's The-Out-of-Body Shop an untethered psyche floats, its connective cord to the body-long-frayed from successive shocks of childhood trauma, the loss of loved ones by death, addiction or abandonment, or to geography and time and the distracting minutiae of life-split. In this shop, reconnection is only possible if the splintered parts of the psyche can be recovered and re-integrated. To this end, the psyches/speakers in these poems sift memories, scratch through the veneer of appearances, and relentlessly stalk ghosts until they surrender the past they hold hostage. With these recovered fragments, the arduous labor of retrofitting the psyche to the body begins. The success of this transformation will be tested when the realigned self comes up against the inevitable shocks of human existence, and the repaired connection between mind and body can hold fast.

Joe Green's selected poems, stretching from his earliest years through 2012.