6AMING by Matt Turner

September, 2026

114 pages

ISBN: 979-8-9907346-8-5

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

“In 6AMING, Matt Turner engages in a continuous practice, looking through the temporarl fragments of our world to find the specter of things that scarecely materialize. Unboundaried physical spaces trace an outline of time’s inability to arrive, in language that recalls its Objectivist and documentary forebears. Narrative coheres only as long as fragments form. Things happen and events unfold against one another, the backdrop of a world waiting to be seen and understood As Turner writes, “the world on graph paper/demarcated with lines, blindlineexplanations/can only be captured/lids shut.” Turner’s writing reminds us again and again of the world as it unfolds into a being we scarcely recognize. And when we open our eyes to look again, what we thought we knew has gone.”

—David James Miller

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 6AMING, four other collections of poetry, several chapbooks, is the translator of Lu Xun's 1927 book of prose poems, Weeds, and has co-translated, with his partner Haiying Weng, around a dozen other books from Chinese, focusing on China's contemporary avant-garde. He has also written essays and reviews for Cha, Hyperallergic Weekend, Bookforum, and a number of other journals. And he has led and participated in workshops and panels at Accent Sisters Gallery, noteably on Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. He works as a commercial translator and copy editor, and teaches writing and research at Westchester Community College.

Excerpts may be found at Ballast, Cha, Pamenar, Voice & Verse, Antiphony: a journal & press, and Cleveland Review of Books.

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

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

‍ ‍