- New Arrivals
Fiction- Historical FictionCrime & ThrillersMysteryScience-FictionFantasyPoetryRomanceChildren’s BooksYoung Adult
- Biographies & MemoirsHistoryCurrent AffairsTech & ScienceBusinessSelf-DevelopmentTravelThe ArtsFood & WineReligion & SpiritualitySportsHumor
Children’s BooksListsGift CardsWhat To ReadMy ListsGames- About & Help
- About Tertulia
- Membership & Co-Ownership
- Shipping & Delivery
- Orders & Payments
- Contact Support
- Send App Feedback
- Follow us
- Download the app
The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Improvisation Without Accompaniment
"Expert and instinctive, like a cool Ed Wilkerson sax solo bouncing with lived rhythms. Morton's consummate poems will echo long after they are read." --Booklist
Selected by Patricia Smith as winner of the 2018 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, Matt Morton's debut poetry collection Improvisation Without Accompaniment embraces uncertainty with a spirit of joyous playfulness.
These lyric poems follow the rhythms of life for a young man growing up in a small Texas town. As the speaker wrestles with ruptures within the nuclear family and the loss of his religious beliefs, he journeys toward a deeper self-awareness and discovers a fuller palette of experiences. Over the course of this collection, the changing seasons of small-town Texas life give way to surprise encounters in distant cities. The speaker's awareness of mortality grows even as he improvises an affirming response to life's toughest questions.
Poignant, searching, and earnestly philosophical, Improvisation Without Accompaniment reaches for meaning within life's joys and griefs.
Book Details
- Publisher: BOA Editions
- Publish Date: Apr 7th, 2020
- Pages: 88
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.90in - 5.80in - 0.30in - 0.30lb
- EAN: 9781942683957
- Categories: • American - General• Subjects & Themes - Places• Subjects & Themes - Death, Grief, Loss
More books to explore
![Book Cover for: White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006 [With CD of Poems], Donald E. Hall](https://d16057n354qyo4.cloudfront.net/9780618919994.jpg?nextExtension=webp&version=1709847364)
About the Author
Matt Morton holds a BA from the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. His poetry appears in AGNI, Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, Tin House Online, and elsewhere. His work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He serves as associate editor for 32 Poems and is a Robert B. Toulouse Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of North Texas. He lives in Dallas, TX.
More books by Matt Morton
What people are saying
Indie publisher of poetry & literature. Fostering appreciation of contemporary lit for 45 years. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and more! 📚
We've been holding this in and it's finally time to share! Matt Morton and his debut collection IMPROVISATION WITHOUT ACCOMPANIMENT has won the Philosophical Society of Texas Book Prize for Poetry!! Congratulations, Matt! Read more on the BOA Blog: https://t.co/t0w150kDSl https://t.co/7bhGSaClhO
Debut book of short stories THE BOUNDARIES OF THEIR DWELLING from @UIowaPress.
Enjoying Matt Morton's book of poems, IMPROVISATION WITHOUT ACCOMPANIMENT. It's fun to read some of these to a child and watch how they're mesmerized.
poet, painter, author of COMPANY, winner of the Levis Prize and the Thom Gunn Award.
I wrote a review of Matt Morton's Improvisation without Accompaniment, selected by @pswordwoman for the A. Poulin Prize Jr. Poetry Prize and published by @boaeditions. It's a beautiful book. 🚂https://www.usi.edu/sir/amie-whittemores-meter-reader/the-meter-reader-matt-morton/
Praise for this book
"What follows are poems of arresting insight and stark assurance. What follows are the agile lines of someone who has mastered the sudden slap, the hushed lyric."
--Patricia Smith, from the Foreword
"What stands in the back of Matt Morton's beautiful and disturbing Improvisation Without Accompaniment is a persistent emotional attachment to literary and religious traditions in which the speaker of these poems intellectually disbelieves. Familial trauma and a foundering romance become occasions for a book-length compelling meditation on our particular moment in history, on the enduring value of person-to-person connection in a world whose ever-accelerating pace of change complicates and deepens the very needs it promises to satisfy."
--Alan Shapiro
"Matt Morton must not have gotten the memo that American poetry is in an extinction event. These are poems of immense intelligence and presence as nimble as flames conveying the nearly unbearable intimacy this life demands, threatens and rewards us with."
--Dean Young
What people are saying
Indie publisher of poetry & literature. Fostering appreciation of contemporary lit for 45 years. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and more! 📚
We've been holding this in and it's finally time to share! Matt Morton and his debut collection IMPROVISATION WITHOUT ACCOMPANIMENT has won the Philosophical Society of Texas Book Prize for Poetry!! Congratulations, Matt! Read more on the BOA Blog: https://t.co/t0w150kDSl https://t.co/7bhGSaClhO