Bøger udgivet af Madhat, Inc.

"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

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.