Ha Ha Ha Thump by Amorak Huey Released by Sundress Publications

sundresspublications

11 years ago

Knoxville, TN-Sundress Publications is pleased to announce that pre-orders are now available for Amorak Huey’s debut full-length, Ha Ha Ha Thump.

You don’t need to count how many times variations on “disappear” and “disguise” appear here to get the sense that Amorak Huey is not only a witty and keen-eyed poet but also a consummate magician, directing our gaze to one thing even as he prepares to show us something better. Thus one poem declares in its title that it is about wallpaper, not breasts. In another, the pope imagines himself a married man, and if that’s not magic, I don’t know what is. Like a 21st -century“Abracadabra!” the phrase “ha ha ha thump” serves as the title of this collection and then recurs as a poem title not once but five times, cracking the ordinary world open to reveal the wonders within.
— David Kirby

Chapter by chapter, night by night, Amorak Huey’s Ha Ha Ha Thump creates a mash up of domestic life and celebrity culture—the beautiful monotony of marriage to a super model, heroic personas professing to their beloveds, a rock star’s immortal prowess shows signs of aging. These poems are insightful and funny, but best of all they are jubilant about all our small human failings adding up to love. The tongue may be hostage to memory, we may “replicate our favorite mistakes,” we may fail to make love in our parents’ hot tub, but what rises in each manifestation of these love stories is the persistence of possibility in all its bright pulsing urgency.
— Traci Brimhall

“The problem,” Amorak Huey writes, “isn’t feeling nothing, it’s feeling everything.” Ha Ha Ha Thump is a book that feels everything, and the feeling it reaches for most is love (in each of its delighted and damaged forms). This is a tremendous book with a spectacular heart, and at the center of that heart you’ll find love. I mean, first you’ll find vampires, bank robbers, reality TV shows, tiny robots and a steady, enduring sadness, but then—in the middle of all that—you’ll find love.
— Matthew Olzmann

Amorak Huey, a former newspaper editor and reporter, teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His chapbook, The Insomniac Circus, was released by Hyacinth Girl Press in 2014. Ha Ha Ha Thump, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications in 2015. His poems appear in the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2012, The Poetry of Sex,and Poetry in Michigan/Michigan in Poetry, as well as journals such as Rattle, The Collagist, The Southern Review, Poet Lore, Menacing Hedge, and others.