About
Matt Hohner won the 2023 Jacar Press Full-Length Book Competition for his book At the Edge of a Thousand Years (selected by Carolyn Forché), published in March 2024. He has been a finalist for the Moth International Poetry Prize and won the Maryland Writers’ Association Poetry Prize. He won the 2016 Oberon Poetry Prize, the 2018 Sport Literate Anything but Baseball Poetry Prize, and the 2019 Doolin Writers’ Weekend Poetry Prize in Ireland. Hohner has held two residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, made possible by a grant from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. He has been nominated for a Best of the Net Award and a Pushcart. An editor for Loch Raven Review, Hohner’s book Thresholds and Other Poems, his first full-length book, was published by Apprentice House Press in Fall 2018. Longlisted for the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize, Hohner has published in Poetry Ireland Review, Breakwater Review, Smartish Pace, Rattle: Poets Respond, New Contrast, Prairie Schooner, Narrative Magazine, takahē, the Cardiff Review, Stony Thursday, and elsewhere.
Featured Work
At the Edge of a Thousand Years
From the opening poem, which could be a response to Nazim Hikmet's "On Living," Matt Hohner writes out of the chaos of our present dystopia, in the predawn twilight of another long century/ at the edge of a thousand years. It is as if the uprisings in Tiananmen and Ferguson, Hong Kong and Baltimore were happening all at once, in the half-pipe of the world's end, in poems that begin in the imaginative densities of childhood, and traverse the lived pandemic, the hatching of Brood X, the violence that surrounds and permeates our built and natural spheres.
The voice is elegiac with an unsentimental edge: to kill is language enough. Certain swerves of syntax and sensibility remind me of the late work of Larry Levis: lines forming sinuous, hypotactic sentences wending through memory into clearings of raw emotional discovery. This is a poet unafraid of risk, as exemplified in "This Poem Has Been Sanitized for Your Protection" and "A Good Guy With A Poem." Very few books hold a mirror to America as this one does.
--Carolyn Forché, final judge, 2023 Jacar Press Full-Length Book Prize
