The Neon Hollywood Cowboy - Matt Mitchell
The Neon Hollywood Cowboy - Matt Mitchell
MY GHOST IS THE LIFE MY X-CHROMOSOMES SAID I’D LIVE.
100 Pages
8.5.″ x 8.5″
ISBN: 978-1-941985-25-0
Release date: April 14, 2021
From the studio that brought you THAT EX., IT IS GOING TO BE A GOOD YEAR, and PET SOUNDS comes a Hollywood Blockbuster for a new generation of badasses and ranch hands. Like a bolo tie at The Warped Tour, The Neon Hollywood Cowboy subverts pop-culture iconography so often associated with the masculine & lays a soundtrack to a raw & emotionally-charged adventure about gender, identity, and the relentless pursuit of friendship. In Matt Mitchell’s big-screen debut (which critics are already calling “an achievement”), this fresh young voice from the Rust Belt turns in a masterpiece.
“An achievement.”
PRAISE FOR THE NEON HOLLYWOOD COWBOY
“Matt Mitchell’s full-length debut, The Neon Hollywood Cowboy, is this young poet’s everything, in all its stickiness, in a darkened theater, with the hype of a summer blockbuster, and you’re in the front row with your first love. It is the birth of whatever gods we praise, the attempt of a father preventing a son from losing his manhood only to watch that boy grow purple wings. It’s Adam reaching for a gun, Eve placing it back into the soft of a holster, and the silence we sink into afterwards. Reader, this is a book you should hold until you turn off the lights, then sit with its neon glow in your palms.”
-Alan Chazaro, This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album
“The Neon Hollywood Cowboy breezes into town like a mysterious stranger on horseback, fearsome and insouciant. Once it's got you by the throat, it never does let go. Mitchell is a true poetic sharpshooter with sniper's instincts and the panache of Billy the Kid. Let him tell you about gender, basketball, and Tyler, the Creator — you'll be glad you did."
-Rax King, TACKY
‘I have abandoned myself // all over the world,’ asserts the speaker in Matt Mitchell’s The Neon Hollywood Cowboy. And thus begins an extraordinary collection of poems that take your breath away with each sharp vulnerability it reveals, all while dazzling you with its humor, tenderness, and surprise. These poems are searing reminders of what it means to reclaim a body. Through odes to boys ‘the color of August,’ Harry Styles’ ‘schoolboy shorts barely covering [his] thigh tattoos,’ and Michael Jordan, leaping from a free throw line, his body ‘contorted . . . into a space shuttle,’ the world of these poems is vast and full of brilliance. Read this book now.”
-Noor Hindi, Diary of a Filthy Woman