At the Edge of a Thousand Years: chapbook review

At the Edge of a Thousand Years

by Matt Hohner

Jacar Press, 2024

reviewed by Bethany Reid

winner of the 2023 Jacar Press Full-Length Poetry Book Contest, selected by Carolyn Forché

Books of poetry often begin with a short poem containing a single image, a poem that creates a reverberating sound like a bell’s chime, an invitation to enter a meditative space.  Matt Hohner’s At the Edge of a Thousand Years is not one of those books. The first poem, “At the Edge of a Thousand Years,” is five pages long. Not that we aren’t invited to step inside. The cover art, “History Is Made to Seem Unfair,” a painting by Michael Prettyman, with its surrealist landscape of fire invites us, as does the epigraph—Thomas McGrath, “Home, then, where the loss is: the rusty ports of the sun.”  Unlike most other poems in the book, the first poem is broken into shards, and the white space framing lines, stanzas, and sections blunt the sharpest edges. So we are invited. As if  encountering an accident, we are compelled to look.

What you see is disturbing: “scarred, bone-thin dogs guarding weedy yards in dead-end alleys, hackles / raised, growling through chain-link fences.” If “pollution has made the sunsets more beautiful,” it adds “emphysemic coughs / to the cacophony of traffic, sirens, shouts, gunshots.” In short, this isn’t the pastoral art you want to hang over your living room couch. Even so, cacophony in this poem and in all the poems in the collection is an artistic and appropriate choice. “For Baltimore,” the poem is dedicated, but it could be dedicated to our entire burning world.  In such a world, the extended metaphor of peeling the layers off a crab, exposing the soft, vulnerable center, becomes our best and only hope.

Beginning with the second poem, “Watching the Video of an Old Classmate Being Murdered,” the choreography changes. The images continue to challenge and disturb (“the gun pressed to your gut,” “the blood-filled bag of your heart”), but the poetic form settles down into long unbroken blocks of lines. A number of poems offer a full-body immersion in Baltimore boyhood. A former classmate goes at the barricades of injustice the way boys attack the world with skateboards: “blood trickling from new wounds staining my socks while I / picked gravel from the heel of my hand” (“Putty Hill”). And for all of it, Hohner offers a heady nostalgia, the boys’ “sweat…like signatures”: “We were all gods then.” Later poems tackle, with the same gritty determination, every world crisis you can name.

Some poems remain local, “Sarah,” for instance, which is an ode to a name painted on a concrete barrier. This poem in particular helped me understand all Hohner’s book as a wake-up call:

                                                           someone who once
     loved you scrawled you in the color of blood, the color
     of hot heart, the color of ache on a dark country bend
     where land meets reservoir, where headlights gave
     you fame a few seconds at a time

I had no difficulty seeing why Carolyn Forché chose this book for the Jacar Prize. Yes, the poems bear bright threads of cacophony like newspaper headlines—school shootings, slavery, war, graffiti, Trump, viruses—all the noise our meditation leaders tell us to set aside so we can breathe.  But there are also threads of euphony, playfulness, even meditation woven throughout.  One poem catalogues “Where Are You Sending Your Poems This Week?” (reform school, prison, Mar-A-Lago, hell). “A Supermarket in Buffalo,” imitates one of Hohner’s mentors. Allen Ginsberg’s poem, “A Supermarket in California,” in turn saluted Walt Whitman. And isn’t Hohner’s poem—in all its political rags—another 21^st century song of self and America?

The task of the poet, as in Whitman’s time, is large. In “A Poet Sits Down to Write after a Massacre”: “The dead keep piling up and all I have are poems / to wrap them in.” And it ends with a call to duty:

     A poet’s contract is blood-inked, bone-stamped,
     ratified eternal at the frontier where hope kisses rust.

These poems astonished me—in that old sense of the word, stoned me, left me dazed, shook me awake to be bludgeoned again. On the back cover, Forché describes their power thus:  “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.” She concludes: “Very few books hold a mirror to America as this one does.” True.

Bethany Reid’s latest book of poetry, The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm was published on January 1st of this year. Her other books of poetry, include Sparrow, which won the 2012 Gell Poetry Prize, and Body My House (2018).  Her poems, essays, and short stories have recently appeared in One Art, Passengers, Persimmon Tree, Constellations, and elsewhere, and her chapbook, The Thing with Feathers, was published in 2020 as part of Triple No. 10 by Ravenna Press. Bethany and her husband live in Edmonds, Washington, near their three grown daughters; she  blogs about writing and life at http://www.bethanyareid.com .

Get At the Edge of a Thousand Years at Jacar Press

Matt Hohner’s blog, with links to poems, articles, etc.