Rhythm & Mucous

By Mather Schneider

"Get some snacks, eh Fatty? Lose any fat yet? Doesn't look like it!"

Rhythm & Mucous is a collection of over three dozen of Mather Schneider's best poems, exploring working-class life, Mexican culture, and more. In the tradition of Charles Bukowski, John Fante, and other chronicles of American low-life, Schneider offers a blea

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terror House Press, LLC
• Release date: Aug 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781951897567

Mather Schneider

Mather Schneider was born in 1970 in Peoria, Illinois. He has lived in Arkansas, Washington, and Arizona, and now lives in Mexico, which is not as glamorous as it sounds. His works can be found in hundreds of journals and web sites, many of which are defunct. He has had many jobs, none of them teaching, although he was a janitor at a community college for eight months. He is most famous for being a cab driver in Tucson for 15 years.

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Praise for Rhythm & Mucous

These are touching pieces, full of pathos, and a great ending for this collection of strong narrative poems that tell stories of life as it is for a poet writing from out his experience, and not from theoretical understanding. A rich experience it is too, including mucus and other unpalatable effluvium, ugliness as well as beauty, laughter as well as tears: a sweet fragrance mixes with the stench here, on these pages, just as in life, in a dry inhospitable landscape like that of Schneider’s poetry, and everywhere else. — Wayne F. Burke, author of Turmoil and Other Stories

Schneider does not write about the pretty, the lovely, the sublime. His poetry is blood and guts writing, a type of cross between Hemingway and Bukowski where the experiences of death are everywhere, a potpourri scattered like shotgun blasts across the pages: a corpse behind a McDonald’s dumpster, a murdered uncle, a cop who dies behind the wheel, a dead puppy dog crying out, as well as anger. The anger of desperate people living desperate lives, an underclass that is powerlessness, moving through life like medieval shades while looking for meaning they never find. These poems will grab you by the gut, wrench you around, and never let go. — Ralph Monday, author of Empty Houses and American Renditions and Bergman’s Island and Other Poems

"In Rhythm & Mucous, Mather Schneider returns with a collection of poems that feel as authentic as a pair of bloodshot eyes staring back at you from the page. His poems move us because they are real. They are lemon trees and tequila shots and the anguish of unexplainable loss. Lots of people want to be Bukowski today. Mather Schneider is just Mather Schneider. I’d rather read a poem written by Mather than 99 percent of what gets called poetry today. That’s the fucking truth." — Jay Sizemore, author of Love and Thievery

"Out on the dusty fringes where America fades into Mexico, Mather Schneider transforms observations of underclass life—however bitter, ugly or absurd—into beautiful vignettes. Each poem paints a scene. A sick man drinking. A barren woman. Dykes brawling outside a gay club. A beautiful, one-legged woman and her callous husband. A slow and painful farewell. Almost a book of short stories, Schneider’s poems are accessible, funny and empathic. If you would not normally consider picking