The Hummingbird - by Matt Longabucco (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The New York School finds new interiority in this collection of poems by turns contemplative, caustic, and wry.

From flower to flower goes the hummingbird, heart pounding, in search of anything sweet. This poet's attention, meanwhile, hovers and darts toward ever-more attenuated spaces of enlivenment and connection in New York City and beyond, filching lyric possibilities from the shadows of indignity and dread. On riverbanks and in dive bars, hospices and deserted libraries, or "in my coffin/reposting mentions," Longabucco's gift is to articulate the specific moment when abjection and edification, shame and satisfaction, banality and profundity tip into one another, only to reveal they were always, inevitably intertwined.

Review Quotes

"This work is true."--Eileen Myles

"The Hummingbird by Matt Longabucco is both in love and a protection curse--theta--or its denser more characteristic sounds. Whether downtown, in the vegetal, on mountaintops, at the Krispy Kreme or the movies, we're mostly outside the house and a poet is acutely present in human songs. The Hummingbird brings the poet and everything else into vividness, even if one has poor reception. What about the world anymore, the poems also ask while inhabiting fractal expansion. Longabucco's language forms what can only be touched, here, in these poems, orchid-like, opening to us, talismanic--like a promise. The Hummingbird is dazzling. Heroic."--Dawn Lundy Martin

"With velocity and range, Matt Longabucco offers us a version of our world, tuned by his open heart and attitude. What he finds there, in our present tense, is not always pretty, but the music is so fucking good! The Hummingbird savors what it uncovers with propulsive, darting intelligence: the sour and the fragrant; what serves us, and how we serve each other through song so we can survive."--Brandon Brown

"Matt Longabucco's masterfully expansive collection is . . . honest and piercing, vital in its formal bravery and aesthetic finesse."

--erica kaufman, in praise of Heroic Dose

"Deliriously erudite."

--Jonathan Lethem, in praise of M/W: An Essay on Jean Eustache's La maman et la putain

"The beautiful intensities of this remarkable book reflect on many mysteries--love, movie making, myths--while illuminating why stories matter to us, and shall always matter: they not only tell us who we are, but what we long to be. A wonderful achievement."

--Hilton Als, in praise of M/W: An Essay on Jean Eustache's La maman et la putain

About the Author

Matt Longabucco is the author of the poetry collection Heroic Dose and of M/W: An essay on Jean Eustache's La maman et la putain, a book-length study of a landmark of French cinema and its creator. He teaches writing, innovative pedagogy, and critical theory at New York University's Liberal Studies Program, and at Bard College's Institute for Writing & Thinking.