H_NGM_N #15 is in the world and MHP represents, with new work from MHP authors Jordan Stempleman, Evelyn Hampton, and Carrie Lorig.

from “Getting Ready” by Jordan Stempleman

There’s a straight-looking man

in a public park, shaving in the water

fountain, so I make sense of the dogs

who do nothing all day but go along

with their aspirations. I fight against this huge old park

tree, deciding whether to be lax today, hold off for later

for say, enormously concerned.

from “Preface” by Evelyn Hampton

I wanted to write the white-tiled entrance to a building. Inside, someone would be waiting for me. I would speak urgently. With thin, glancing enhancements, I would become someone else.

Outside, a yellow flower would be showing. The back end of a car would also be visible.

A bit of red sauce would still be clinging to a yell. 

Everything would have meaning in relation to itself. Everything would be a god (another yell).

from “Scatterstate” by Carrie Lorig

i do my knees for a long time, and i lush out hard. i launch out hard because it frails good. Like flows, like flower rodeos, i g r e w s o m e, i dark some, and grope myself into full glow. i chase glow into shapes. i chase shapes with barbwire rocks. i cut right into the earth. when i cut grass, i shed objects. the lawn has a moan thread that suits me, that burns me into such a clumsy body, that wobbles blotted me into lop hided blooms that drag a ripping sound behind them. the size of your names, what a strong plush into a living stream of the bizarre soft that is always flying me into buildings. my constant is my hands in the dusk mange. my hands write me with sway tongue, and my stomach gets sway, sway open.

Check out three new poems by jordan Stempleman in the new issue of Country Music!

Over at The Lit Pub, a new review by Simon Jacobs of Jordan Stempleman’s No, Not Today really digs deep into what makes these poems work, what keeps them kicking beginning to end. 

“I think I’ve narrowed down where the magic comes from. It’s all about the slippage, the shifts where the normal suddenly transposes with something else, something strange or fantastic or simply unexpected. The interjections foster the shifts, they say, ‘Hey, I’m talking to you, now let me take you away.’”

The new issue of jubilat is out in print and features a poem from Jordan Stempleman, available on their website as a preview. It starts a little something like this:

It looks like I’ve done something terrible,
unforgivable, but all I’ve done is butchered
a pomegranate while listening to cartoons.
Who really gives a shit about fruit and its
triumphant preciousness, its leaking, its
lies about what I am and what I have done?

Over at the Outsider Writers Collective, the fabulous Mel Bosworth reacts to No, Not Today by Jordan Stempleman, MHP’s most recent release. Here’s how he ultimately sees the book:

“Whether identifying beauty by what it’s not or by its ability to change—as a thought or a physical body—Stempleman keeps plenty busy stuffing his poems with the confetti, rice, and rain of life. Instead of a bending to a bearded god or some such deity, these poems urge the reader to submit to originality. They’ll find plenty of that within these pages.”

Edward Mullany wrote about Jordan Stempleman’s new book of poems, “No, Not Today,” for the NY Daily News Books Blog. Among other smooth insights, he says—

“Stempleman knows that our shared American consciousness is something he can rely on; there is, after all, something about each weekday that is recognizable, that gives it a certain ‘feeling’. In this way, his work respects the instincts of his readers.

But to rely on that feeling as an end itself – which Stempleman does not do – could become tiresome, because it would reveal itself as a novelty, something that is interesting for a moment, but that lacks endurance or meaning.

What he does, instead, is allow a kind of purposeful, intelligent meandering from one poem to the next. So that the question of whether those days of the week mean something to the poems to which they lend their names recedes into the background.“

Thanks to Edward for his time and attention with the newest MHP release! Read the whole review here!

Check out Mr. NAP’s awesome discussion of Jordan Stempleman’s new book here.

How many pinches and dashes will it take? I heard you tell the answer to whoever you are in your apartment with. I did not know what language you used, but recognized it as a language. This I am certain. Or it was yourself who you are building inside of yourself and I am listening to you like a neighbor will listen when they see a neighbor with their mattress outside attempting to sleep on every beautiful thing in the neighborhood?

gets a little rowdy, a little sad, and a whole lot of awesome. POEM IS HERE

What happened is I killed something in the swamp.

I thought of danger, and I kicked something.

I thought of what should be drained, and I killed

one meat of peach, one unfinished child.