Matthew Hittinger

Matthew Hittinger was born in Bethlehem, PA (not far from the grave of H.D.) and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan where he won a Hopwood Award for Poetry and The Helen S. and John Wagner Prize. A finalist for the 2005 National Poetry Series and semifinalist for the 2006 Walt Whitman Award, his work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fine Madness, DIAGRAM, Memorious, Meridian, DMQ Review, and elsewhere, including Best New Poets 2005. He lives and works in New York City.

Winner of the Spire Poetry Chapbook Award

Pear Slip
(c)2007, Matthew Hittinger
ISBN 13: 978-1-934828-00-7, $9.00

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"'Take a pear. Any pear. Divide it into sensuous surface and the idea of sensuous surface. Mix with one part philosophy and two parts jeu d'esprit. Pass the whole through a filter of buoyant affection for Cezanne, Van Gogh, Pissarro, and their everyday proliferation on posterboard and computer screen, and this is what you get: a fertile concoction of urban velocity posing as still life. Pear Slip is that wonderful thing: a sustained and disciplined act of fancy."

 - Linda Gregerson

"'Send me sequences of pears,' Matthew Hittinger writes, taking Wallace Stevens as a departure point for studying the world through what's at hand, the form and color of a single, sensuous fruit. These witty, pleasurable poems conjure Cezanne and Satie, Bishop and Van Gogh, fellow students of the given world's mysterious seductions -- brought, in this poet's capable hands, to the eyes and lips of the reader. "

 -Mark Doty