Many Hats

As Mike Schneider writes in his poem "Astrakahn," time & space collapse in these poems about hats, orienting readers to the anarchic lyricism of his Many Hats . For instance, Marge, of TV's The Simpsons, coexists with Francisco Goya, Ukraine's Orange Revolution, Bolshevik terror and the poem's namesake lamb's-fur hat. The poems, each titled for a style of hat, bring widely diverse people and things together in a linguistic space bounded only by imagination. With an epigraph from Max Ernst's 1920 collage, "The Hat ... Read More

As Mike Schneider writes in his poem "Astrakahn," time & space collapse in these poems about hats, orienting readers to the anarchic lyricism of his Many Hats . For instance, Marge, of TV's The Simpsons, coexists with Francisco Goya, Ukraine's Orange Revolution, Bolshevik terror and the poem's namesake lamb's-fur hat. The poems, each titled for a style of hat, bring widely diverse people and things together in a linguistic space bounded only by imagination. With an epigraph from Max Ernst's 1920 collage, "The Hat Makes the Man," Schneider invokes the dada-esque spirit of European artists and writers a century ago. Each hat-from "Fedora" to "Tuque"-triggers a round of lexical play, touching many pages of western culture along the way. Stylistically, unlike much contemporary American poetry, these "hats" rely almost not-at-all on "confessional" narrative. The autobiographical "I" seldom speaks. "Exuberance is beauty," declared William Blake. Drawing from pop culture, including movies, novels and cartoons, Schneider injects-as he says in "Stovepipe" -a dose of exuberance into the body of the world. ----- Early Praise ----- In Mike Schneider's new collection, Many Hats , moments of sharp self-interrogation break through the surface of playful, pop-culture-saturated poems titled for a variety of different hats. Schneider is quick-witted, and his deft handling of language heightens the poems' music. Surveying the role the titular hats play in twentieth-century cinema, he highlights the relationship between whimsy and contemplation. -Speer Morgan, editor, The Missouri Review With Mike Schneider's brandishment of hats, I've taken my fine time to see how each one fits. I recommend them-an education in headwear that's also an exercise in serious poetry-play. Original, entertaining, informative, memorable-joyfully creative, what else would we want a collection of poems to be? To Schneider and these poems, I take my hat off. -Jeff Worley, Kentucky Poet Laureate (2019-2020) Read Less