Against the Hard Angle
Matt Robinson
¶ It could be said of Matt Robinson's Against the Hard Angle that truth bends around its object. The poems are direct but leave the reader with a sense that something is unspoken. Spoiled milk, congealed blood from an injury, a workbench. Just when you might think these poems are parochial, Robinson writes of a delay in an airport. There is a range of subject-matter and a range of experience in these poems. And in their understatement, Robinson's poems feel contemporary. Objects are used to hint at human relationships, relationships perhaps difficult to discuss, haunted by an unspoken pessimism. Everything in here is more than it seems.
Matt Robinson lives in Halifax, NS, and works as a Residence Life Manager with Dalhousie University. His most recent previous collection is no cage contains a stare that well (ECW, 2005), a full-length volume of hockey poems. Other collections include A Ruckus of Awkward Stacking, which was nominated for the Lampert and ReLit awards, how we play at it: a list, and tracery & interplay. His poems have appeared in anthologies such as The New Canon, Breathing Fire 2, Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada, Exact Fare Only 2, and Landmarks: An Anthology of New Atlantic Canadian Poetry of the Land. Most recently, Matt has received the Malahat Review Long Poem prize for an earlier version of Against the Hard Angle.
2009
6.75" × 9.75", 20pp. 100 + A-Z copies.
$65
ISBN: 978-1-894744-26-3
Copies available, .
Colophon:
The text is hand-set in 14pt Spectrum, with display type printed from polymer. Page stock is Magnani Velata, with a wrapper of handmade cotton by Reg Lissel in Vancouver. Text printed letterpress in 2 colours throughout.