“Drunk you were & poor of heart & sure of me.” // from “Mephisto Waltz”

In the poems of this bold second collection, Matt Salyer merges the personal with the historical, the demotic with the devotional, the immediate and the expansive.

• Title: Probation: Poems
• Author: Matthew Carey Salyer
• Publisher: Pen & Anvil
  
• December 15, 2024
• Format: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Length: 90pp
• Dimensions: 7.44"w x 9.69"h
• ISBN: 9780982162583

About the book:

Salyer's hypermodern style shakes with Joycean ingenuity, elsewhere recalling the serendipitous misspellings and homophony of early Keats. His word-play with abbreviation and shorthand evokes text message conversation, David Jones’ Anathemata, medieval scribal tradition and the ecclesiastical codes of centuries past. The allover patterns of typographic experimentation and elemental imagery show kinship with the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, and Geoffrey Hill; namely, to the philosophy that script is a simultaneous manifestation of Word, Logos, and Spirit. Readers who would seek a bread-crumb trail through this abundance of influences might look to the enigmatic erasure texts that separate Probation into distinct movements. These interstitial ciphers perhaps point to an underlying through-line.

In Probation, Salyer fuses resonant intelligence and exhilarating sensorial richness. It is a collection that demands engagement.

Praise for the collection:

Carlie Hoffman, author of When There Was Light: “Like caddisfly, are human beings, too, dwellers of our own labor while at the same time catechisms of labor itself? How many ways to trace commerce through language and return to the sea? How is poetry a mechanism for the survival of language? These urgent questions arise from the formally dexterous and inventive poems in Salyer’s incomparably transfixing new book. The speaker, an English professor doing gig-work as a bouncer at a bar in the Bronx to make ends meet, guides us through the medieval ages, “Blake’s furnaces,” the highways toward Connecticut, West Point Military Academy, museums, turnkey properties, Port Jersey, creating an atlas of industrial progress and regression as he considers what goes ‘unmade, what must be unbearable solitude in achievement.’ In times of housing crises, economic collapse, and threat to education, these are simultaneously ‘times ordered in iambs,’ Salyer illuminates, expressing how poetry — poiesis — is. ‘The river throws a fit of ice’ and it is the human song of Probation, thawing us back into being. You need to read this book.

Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of The Second O of Sorrow: “Salyer is part American Beckett, part Brendan Behan, or maybe he’s what we’d get if the Borstal Boy had grown up in the Bronx, joined the military, became a professor and a bouncer all in once, and read Lord Jim and reflected upon his life as a man with regrets while tossing drunks out onto the street. In these poems, fragments, monologues and ‘medieval erasures’, Salyer has penned a book that is part ethnography, part imaginary palimpsest of streets and texts down enough to know ‘all the great rappers of Yonkers are dead. / I will address my son through their exit wound.’ This is poetry as music, fracture, and collage, remixing (like a DJ) language(s) both archaic and thoroughly futuristic for the twenty-first century... a book that beautifully insists, ‘I can only report something of our own, its small tantrums, feedings, encaging, the thrum & iridescent brushstroke on a dull bird’s throat.’”

James Stotts, author of Elgin Pelicans: “Probation is a punishing book of poetry, arcane and demotic to the breaking point. Its fits are as old as Cú Chulainn battling the waves and as fresh as a kid wearing a #BTScomeback tee. Salyer’s tender rants have the charm of a penitent or holy fool overcome by tongues. He’s no captain, knight, or saint. But he has a heroic flaw: gamely revisiting the guilt of not having gone down with the ship. Poetry paying its dues.”

Medha Singh, author of Ecdysis: "In Probation’s brilliant pastiche we find ourselves at a grand wedding of past and future, myth and history — these poems are masterful, allusive, incantatory. For Juana Ines de la Cruz whirls around in the center mixing the sacred and profane, a moment in probation so epic yet intimate, so deeply woven with the vagaries of love, the unreliable moods of the divine. This book is a jewel — read it."