Thresholds and Other Poems

Matt Hohner's Thresholds and Other Poems is a poetry of loss, violence, beauty and love.

In this collection, Hohner addresses the toll and joy of living, head-on and honestly. Facing rough social and political headwinds blowing at home and abroad, Hohner speaks with full voice against the storm of malevolence that so often seems the norm. In this terror, though, there is a desperate clinging to love, which Hohner returns to simply and elegantly. Perhaps it is in his reaching for solace that Hohner's poems offer their greatest strength, while promising something more relatable: catharsis. The value of Thresholds and Other Poems is not in the path to peace this collection seeks, but in the pressure release valve it gives the reader from a tumultuous world. Friendship and marriage, the sensual act of eating an oyster, a hike in the woods at dusk--all find celebration in these pages. There is hope in these poems, and you will laugh and smile, too. Thresholds takes us to that frontier at the edge of the darkness, where the light lives.

Matt Hohner holds an M.F.A. in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. His work has been shortlisted for the Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize, taken both third and first prizes in the Maryland Writers Association Poetry Prize and won the Oberon Prize for Poetry. His work has appeared in The Moth, Crab Orchard Review, Free State Review, Comstock Review, The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Mom Egg Review, Cobalt, The Baltimore Review, and numerous other publications. Hohner lives in Baltimore, Maryland.