Improvisation Without Accompaniment

Matt Morton author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:BOA Editions, Limited

Published:23rd Apr '20

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Improvisation Without Accompaniment cover

  • Galley mailing to key reviewers and media outlets 4-5 months prior to publication.
  • Advanced review copies and press materials sent to targeted list of 150-200 reviewers. Additional review copies available by request: [email protected].
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  • Simultaneous ebook and print publication. Ebook ISBN will be included on all press materials, author and publisher websites, and whenever print ISBN is listed.
  • Event pitches to various literary festivals, including AWP 2020 in San Antonio, TX, and the 2020 Texas Book Festival.
  • Possible joint events with Hai-Dang Phan (Sarabande), Rosalie Moffett (Ecco), James Arthur (Signal Editions), Jehanne Dubrow (U of Evansville), Richie Hofmann (Alice James), Solmaz Sharif (Graywolf), Peter Mishler (Sarabande), Sam Ross (Four Way), Margaret Ross (Omnidawn), A.E. Stallings (FSG), Corey Marks (New Issues), and other BOA poets.
  • Limited co-ops available.
  • Promotion through the author’s website: https://mattmortonpoetry.com
  • Set in the backdrop of rural Texas, Matt Morton’s debut poetry collection reaches for existential meaning within life's joys and griefs.

    "Expert and instinctive, like a cool Ed Wilkerson sax solo bouncing with lived rhythms. Morton's consummate poems will echo long after they are read." —Booklist

    Selected by Patricia Smith as winner of the 2018 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, Matt Morton’s debut poetry collection Improvisation Without Accompaniment embraces uncertainty with a spirit of joyous playfulness.

    These lyric poems follow the rhythms of life for a young man growing up in a small Texas town. As the speaker wrestles with ruptures within the nuclear family and the loss of his religious beliefs, he journeys toward a deeper self-awareness and discovers a fuller palette of experiences. Over the course of this collection, the changing seasons of small-town Texas life give way to surprise encounters in distant cities. The speaker’s awareness of mortality grows even as he improvises an affirming response to life’s toughest questions.

    Poignant, searching, and earnestly philosophical, Improvisation Without Accompaniment reaches for meaning within life’s joys and griefs.

    “What follows are poems of arresting insight and stark assurance. What follows are the agile lines of someone who has mastered the sudden slap, the hushed lyric.”
    —Patricia Smith, from the Foreword

    “What stands in the back of Matt Morton’s beautiful and disturbing Improvisation Without Accompaniment is a persistent emotional attachment to literary and religious traditions in which the speaker of these poems intellectually disbelieves. Familial trauma and a foundering romance become occasions for a book-length compelling meditation on our particular moment in history, on the enduring value of person-to-person connection in a world whose ever-accelerating pace of change complicates and deepens the very needs it promises to satisfy.”
    —Alan Shapiro

    “Matt Morton must not have gotten the memo that American poetry is in an extinction event. These are poems of immense intelligence and presence as nimble as flames conveying the nearly unbearable intimacy this life demands, threatens and rewards us with.”
    —Dean Young

    • Winner of A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize 2019 (United States)

    ISBN: 9781942683957

    Dimensions: unknown

    Weight: unknown

    88 pages