Interview at Erbacce Journal

I’m honored & deeply grateful to be the featured poet in Erbacce Journal (issue 55)! An interview followed by seven of my poems! My sincere thanks to Alan Corkish & Andrew Taylor at Erbacce Press! And my special thanks to Matt Duggan, the winner of the Erbacce Prize for Poetry (2015) for interviewing me. Matt is a fine poet & if you are not already familiar with his poetry, please dig his work. Below you will find his bio & book links.

Click here to read the interview : interview_erbacce

Thanks everyone!

Matt Duggan : Bio

Born 1971, Bristol, U.K.

Poems have appeared in A Restricted View from Under the Hedge, Osiris Poetry Journal, The Journal, Into the Void, Ghost City Review, and many more…his frst full collection Dystopia 38.10 won the Erbacce Prize for poetry in 2015, his poem ‘ Elegy for Magdalene’ won the Into the Void Poetry Prize in 2016, Matt became a core member at erbacce – press in 2017, and has had two  new chapbooks published in 2018 One Million Tiny Cuts and A Season in Another World, he has read his work in Italy, Greece, U.K., New York, Boston, and Philly, his second full collection Woodworm is due to be published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press in March 2019, Matt is currently working on a new collection of poems titled ‘ Under the Moon and Beneath the Earth ( Thirty- Two Deconstructed  Sonnets on Love, Death and Propaganda).

A Season in Another World : Matt Duggan

Thirty West Publishing House www.thirtywestph.com

36 pages perfect bound  Issue #55 The Journal

Sam Smith – Editor    Rating 5/5

First impressions are of a lovingly produced pamphlet, textured paper, though given to its design; poems I assumed, given the title and where published, would be of Matt’s US reading trip. Not so, these are of many places and mental inscapes. Homogenous, the very first poem, is enough in itself to justify Matt calling himself a poet. He is so entitled. And so many lines here begging to be quoted. But until you come by this pamphlet you will have to make do with this last stanza from Venice at Night – ‘ I am that stranger pacing the slurps pf San Marco:/ the eye bestriding a black ripple of canals,/ where one short wave can resemble the whiteness in bones.’ I tell myself to obey my own paragraph strictures. But if there’s a better poem anywhere on domestic abuse than Watching Cobwebs on Skirting Boards One Friday Night tell me.

Signed Copies are Available http://www.paypal.me/MattDuggan0 £10.00 plus 1.20 P&P/ £3.00

Dystopia 38.10 : Matt Duggan :

Winner of the Erbacce Prize for Poetry 2015

Erbacce Press

128 pages perfect bound

Signed Copies are Available

Via Paypal http://www.paypal.me/MattDuggan0

£12.00 plus £1.20 P&P

£3.00 P&P Outside of the U.K.

Maria Castro Dominguez

Poet and Author

Rating 5/5 –

Dystopia 38.10 comprises a balanced innovative collection of ground-breaking poetry. It is a poetic dystopia divided into four zones, city life, private life, the life of things, and inner life all blended together. The poetic voice like all good art provokes defamiliarization or ostranenie with a multitude of poetic devices, such as alliteration, repetition, half-rhymes, and enjambments. Also it has something of the confessional poetic strand that Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath propagated. It awakens us from a comatose and complacent state and thrusts us out of the cement of our comfort zone, right from first line.
Matt Duggan, the author of this engaging collection, is a poetry activist who swerves our emotions, twists and tangles our feelings, making us see anew. With his antithetical language, his satire, his thudding rhythm, his novel use of words we are helplessly under his spell. Dystopia 38.10 is also imbued with poignant humanity and love for everything human. Despite the dystopian connotations, we feel that its poems take us through urban and suburban landscapes with a voice that both consoles and inspires change.