6AMING by Matt Turner

September, 2026

114 pages

ISBN: 979-8-9907346-8-5

Available for pre-order

In Matt Turner’s 6AMING, both time and language are fragmented. Nothing is continuous. Everything is paused & restarted. Not unlike life itself. Turner uses the lyric’s atemporal structure to ask bold questions about linearity, progress, and the myths of wholeness. Amazingly, in a book that celebrates caesuras and incompleteness, there is never a moment of stasis. It’s all movement. Motion. It is rare when a work of art can be simultaneously disjointed and fluid, but this is one of those instances. Jump in. Turner has made a myriad of spaces for you. 

—Dean Rader

In Matt Turner’s 6AMING places pass before us on page, screen, out a window, the back of “lids shut” -- a marvel of motion and a call to decipher as cool as a camera eye. As if walking into a landscape as it’s being drawn “figurative line over it out there / pause, the line continues until exit.” We exit and enter lush description that refuses to settle into a complete picture. Rider reader viewer be made into motion by this series of dense brief clips, each page titled with a time, each poem potent glance --“I looked closely -- bulldozers doing / their jobs (what was the / job? Riding).” Time-stamped, broken into frames, place after place runs through us but place names are thwarted, replaced by, sensation “breeze on bare legs” or “sound of water through a message.”Like dreams that are all proprioception “like an interior set” streets, buildings, fields, skies emanate and make feeling. Each page is spatial proposition “as if spoken.” By what magic does Turner render time more vivid than image? In this riveting suspense orchestra how does he empty expectation of content?-- “storage units full now emptied” --our bodies, books, clocks beautifully reamed and returned to us as riding.

—Susan Gevirtz

Attention is animation. And Matt Turner, in some sense, hallows the practice of attention by finding the urgencies and mundanities in what he witnesses. In this writing, find: “a shimmering lecture,” “nomadic context,” a recursive honing in that “ribbons/ribbons into itself.” That is, Turner taps the rhythms, even, of the banal and so illuminates the ways we improvise reality. We are here invited to join him in this, “transmit/out a call for action, practice/what kind of practice/happens in an old lean-to/but – commence –” As John Cage said, “Begin anywhere.”

—Elizabeth Robinson

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6AMING was begun while watching Jacques Rivette’s 13-hour film Out 1, a film with acting, conspiracies, gossip, threesomes and more. 6AMING documents the slow and quick passage of time in a placeless place––sometimes on the screen, sometimes around people and things. Fragmentary narratives that mimic automatic writing, enumerating the world happening within brief minutes, they game the facts of the mind as if those facts were poems. Influenced by the experimental music of contemporary Beijing, 6AMING presents the world as all that is the case: détourned text.

Matt Turner is the author of four additional full collections of poetry, most recently The Places (BlazeVOX 2025), and three chapbooks. He has translated or co-translated around a dozen books from Chinese, focusing on China’s contemporary avant-garde––including, notably, works by Yan Jun, Wan Xia, and Ou Ning. His essays and reviews can be found in Cha, Hyperallergic Weekend, Bookforum and elsewhere. He lives in New York City, where he is a commercial translator and copy editor.

Excerpts may be found at Ballast, Cha, Pamenar, Voice & Verse, and Antiphony: a journal & press

NO U-TURN—6AMING: Themes and Contexts by Matt Turner (Cha).

An interview with Matt may be found on the Antiphony Interviews page.

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