Sign-In
Cart
Many Hats
Paperback
Fashion BiographiesFashion & AccessoriesGeneral Poetry
ISBN13: 9781956285888
Publisher: Poetry Box
Published: May 15 2025
Pages: 42
Weight: 0.20
Height: 0.11 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
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 ReviewWith 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)
Also from
Schneider, Mike
Preussischer Anzeiger: Das politische Monatsmagazin - Ausgabe April/Mai
Gronemann, Jorn
Schneider, Mike
Luley, Wolfgang
Paperback
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Pitavy, Francois
Alighieri, Dante
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Lao Tzu
Paperback
They Bloom Because of You: Poems on the Infinite Love, Growth, and Magic of Motherhood
Urlichs, Jessica
Paperback
This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have
Smith, Joshua Luke
Hardcover