A selection of additional poems from my book At the Edge of a Thousand Years, winner of the 2023 Jacar Press Full-length Poetry Book Contest.

A selection of additional poems from my book Thresholds and Other Poems (Apprentice House 2018).

A selection of additional poems from my full-length manuscript An Indifferent Sky. 

A selection of poems from M/OTHER, my current manuscript in progress, which began in earnest at my second residency at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in June 2022. It explores the complex circumstances, consequences, issues, and lifelong questions I've had regarding being adopted as an infant, as well as the fallout from my adoptive mother leaving the family when I was ten years old. It explores the frought and fluid themes of identity, abandonment, truth, and the ever-present nature vs. nurture argument over who I am at the genetic level, who I have become as a person, and how recent revelations have influenced how I see myself in the world.  

Aesthetically, this manuscript employs a necessary  shift in style and form to something more experimental in places, reflecting the often chaotic sense of information overload, conflicting interpretations of genetic data from competing DNA services, and how they play into the narrative(s) my parents and I have patchworked and filled in together based on sometimes erroneous, and oftentimes missing information about my origins. 

Working on this manuscript has been an exciting departure from the style and voice I normally use, and which I have developed over my career. It's been a pleasure reaching back to my studies alongside avant-garde writers and thinkers as an MFA student at Naropa University to utilize the most appropriate language and methodology in addressing and reflecting the intricacies and strangeness of my ongoing self-discovery as an adopted child.

I recently enjoyed reading a few poems for the blogspot Eat the Storms, hosted by Damien Donnelly. (Listen for a special guest appearance by Cassanova Cicada, translating one of my poems into Cicadian.) Go to the 15 minute mark on the recording here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/36ZYifZq0tj87fu26STAIC

Another poem, "Mob Hit at the Ark Ramp," winner of the 2018 Sport Literate "Anything But Baseball" Poetry Contest, can be read and heard here: https://sportliterate.org/2018/11/mob-hit-at-the-ark-ramp/

My poem "How to Unpack a Bomb Vest," which appears earlier in my portfolio, can be experienced online in text and audio form here: http://www.rattle.com/how-to-unpack-a-bomb-vest-by-matt-hohner/.  It was featured on May 25, 2017 on the Rattle: Poets Respond website. It was written in response to the suicide bombing of a concert in Manchester, England, which was attended by mostly young girls and women.

The first poem recording uploaded here is "Kevin," about a former student in my tenth grade World Literature class at Towson High School. It was the featured poem for Monday, November 3, 2014 on The Five-Two, a blog of poems about crime, edited by Gerald So. (Recording credit: Jason DeFontes.) Here is the link to the The Five-Two (scroll down to find my poem and recording): http://poemsoncrime.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2014-12-15T00:01:00-05:00&max-results=20&reverse-paginate=true

The second  poem, "Cal Ripken," was included on a CD of local Baltimore and Maryland poets reading their work, produced by Blair Ewing and released in 2001, entitled Word Up, Baltimore! I wrote it during the height of the media frenzy over "The Streak" in a bit of a tongue-in-cheek tone after detecting during and interview of Ripken a bit of weariness on his part over the hype surrounding what would be his eventual breaking of Lou Gehrig's record for consecutive games played. 

After my poem "How to Unpack a Bomb Vest" was published online at Rattle: Poets Respond on May 25, 2017, Rattle editor Timothy Green put me in contact with Dutch composer Brechtje Vandijk (she goes simply by her first name, Brechtje). Brechtje had read my poem and wanted to create an original musical composition for it. In a series of e-mails, I worked with Brechtje to edit my poem down a bit in order to fit it better into a musical score, to be sung with accompaniment. 

These images are of my revised poem and a few sections of  the poem as lyrics with the musical score written by Brechtje. The work was performed in early March 2018 at several venues around the Netherlands; my wife and I flew to the Netherlands to see the live performance by the avant-garde band VONK (which means "spark" in Dutch) at the Crosslinx Music Festival held at the Muziekgebouw / Bimhuis venue in Amsterdam on March 3, 2018. You can watch the video of the performance below. VONK also later recorded "How to Unpack a Bomb Vest" for a CD. 

A collaboration with Baltimore artist "Spilly" for the Baltimore Ekphrasis Project, published online and on a giant LED billboard on Charles Street next to Penn Station in Baltimore.

My poem "Pulse" was written in response to Spilly's painting "Play." Spilly, in turn, painted "Of Light and Water" in response to my poem of the same title.

Here is a link to my poems alongside artwork by Spilly: https://thelightekphrastic.com/baltimore-hoop-love-hohner/.

States is my chapbook published by Third Ear Books. This chapbook originally started as a series of micro cassette tapes spoken as a travel journal as I drove solo across the country to Naropa University (then called The Naropa Institute) in Boulder, Colorado to pursue my MFA in Writing at their Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. States was first transcribed verbatim from the tapes, then shaped, workshopped, and edited over the next two years. This is the final product of the creative portion of my master's thesis, which Editor Jerry Tumlinson at Third Ear Books was gracious enough to publish.