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

"Matthew Hittinger is an artist. He is able to paint with words intimate still lifes focused on one object - a pear - and make each of the eight poems in this small but treasurable book an experience the reader will use as a pause to enjoy, yes, but to also become more acutely attuned to the simple things in our lives that deserve our attention. Hittinger introduces his observations and responses to the pear in a set of four brief statements 'Preface: Pear Poetics' in which he grapples with the individuality of the pear as a shape mistaken for an apple, reminding us of the antiquity of the fruit as 'a hollow teardrop in Eve's neck, a hardened lump in Adam's throat', and pays homage to the pear's unique defining shape 'Do not come to pears with a preconceived idea of what form is. They will elude you; Let the pears realize their form to you. Abandon will. Give in to the pears' way of seeing.' And with this introduction he continues on every page to address every aspect of the pear from scent to taste, to form in art, to variations in types ('Comice, Forelle, Anjou, Bosc, Seckel, Packham'), manner of packing in named crates, even making the shape of a pear out of words as in 'Silkscreen: Pome in a Bowl.' At times playful, at times irreverent, and at other times reverential, Hittinger's writing style is visual and visceral, making the most of confining his attention to one loved inanimate object: '...peach, brown, cream/ reflected beneath each pear in chunks/ of red, vermilion, lemon: lights of a party-float,/ bathers drying off. pears sloughing color/ as light particles strike the atoms in the skin, surface/ of object feathered. Squint your eyes/ and a photograph takes form, what van Gogh saw/and repeated:....' If Matthew Hittinger can create such extended beauty with one subject, he makes us hungry for more expanded topics. This is a small treasure of a book. Highly recommended."

- Grady Harp