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A NORTHERN SPRING
(Trio House Press) This book expands, expounds and grows even while it chronicles life in a world contracted by plague and politics. A couple traveling at the beginning of the pandemic must dine in public but they eat with joy, like it’s the end of the world. Fear of being stranded abroad by a travel ban gives way to fears of what it means to be always at home. Observation satiates, these poems suggest, where other appetites for touch and fellowship must be suppressed. Then, in the 2020 unrest of Minneapolis, the world begs witness, and these poems continue to see. It's remarkable the way Mauch can focus on two subjects at once—Covid19 and 9/11, The Troubles in Ireland and fractured US politics. As he shifts between distant observation and intimate experience, he’s like an optometrist asking of each lens “Which is better, this…or this?” It’s maybe not all better, but the past few years become a bit more focused for reading these poems – Heid E. Erdrich, author of Little Big Bully, editor of New Poets of Native Nations Mauch’s movement between genres & forms, poetry & prose, calls attention to the ruptures of lyric time, ruptures apparent in his subject matter: the Belfast Troubles, the coronavirus pandemic, the murder of George Floyd—hybridity as subversion of verse, against the procedures of prose. However, just as humans break through this cordon sanitaire, so might humanity: this collection also tries to connect us, blur genre & even grammar, to turn violence toward justice, a true revolution. – Heidi Czerwiec, author of Fluid States and Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Pose A Northern Spring is a book unlike any other, a missive from the plague spring of 2020 that captures the strangeness and immediacy of world falling into silence, of voyagers trying to return from abroad—paused in the amber of lockdown and the liminal spaces of travel—only to return to a city on fire: Minneapolis in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Part memoir, part needle-skipping-in-its-groove travelogue, part collection of lyric poetry, Mauch juxtaposes agile musings on the Troubles in Belfast with frontline anecdotes from the protests, and when we shift from his evocative prose into poetry, it's as if his dispatches have broken open into a murmuration of starlings. Infectiously readable, A Northern Spring is a beautifully unsettled text for a poignantly destabilized world. – Michael Bazzett, author of The Echo Chamber, translator of The Popol Vuh |
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WE'RE THE FLOWNOVER. WE COME FROM FLYOVERLAND.
(Gold Wake Press) We’re the Flownover. We Come From Flyoverland. reveals the splendor—even audacity—that exists in locations and scenes so often not in the center of attention. These expansive poems give quiet, insistent attention (”tuning and tuning”) to what might be commonly dismissed as the outskirts, or on the way to noted landmarks. This collection stays in these liminal worlds, whether in the community college parking lot, at a laundromat on a Wednesday afternoon, or waiting to cross Hennepin Avenue at night, where Mauch magnifies them to astonishing, sometimes even damning, insight. Confronting the self and its responsibility, these poems ask: What is my field of vision? How can I step outside of it, change its scope, to witness and “see ourselves / and one another / for what we are”? In We’re the Flownover. We Come From Flyoverland., we see a middle America blazing with flashes of beauty, of conviction, and even of resistance. – Gale Marie Thompson, author of Helen or My Hunger and Solider On We’re The Flowover. We Come From Flyoverland. introduces a roving, Baudelarian speaker seeking to “translate pigeon into English” (the bird's music, or grammatically simplified language), among the streets of “bone and ash,” post-empire USA: home to “The Longest Winter on Record.” Amid “mirrors not made of metal amalgam and glass,” and indexical signs replacing reality (”food we want to eat via pointing”), he mourns the tendency to kill “not the enemy but the messenger,” in a world where what's sacred is unprotected: a “a temple where the door is never locked.” But this speaker is not dissuaded by simulacra nor the steady thrum (“wrong, goddamnit”) that “grows into what I hear”: instead, he tunes into a “species forgotten,” a “small print none have ever bothered to read.” The title delivers its promise: the flownover (disregarded) from flyoverland (transcendent) arrive at a Carpe Diem not rapacious but ecstatic, as tourists of the body, in “climax,” become those of the mind. – Virginia Konchan, author of Any God Will Do and The End of Spectacle Reading Mauch’s work, I’m reminded over and over of Stanley Kunitz’s statement that “The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.” Here we have the kind of shimmering lyric insights that can come only from a mind and heart far along the path of enlightenment. What a great gift Mauch has given us by inviting us to share in the journey, offering us no less than “a temple where the door is never locked.” – Melissa Studdard, author of Like a Bird with a Thousand Wings and I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast |
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BIRD~BRAIN
(Trio House Press) In Bird-Brain, Matt Mauch has blossomed a heart-swollen landscape from the mundane—the alleyway, the cubicle, the interstate. His tornadic writing is a brilliant abracadabra—a lavish spiraling together and upward of intellect and emotion, of belief and need and fun. These poems resonate with a sensibility attuned to the body as it is and once was, in love and conversant with the vividly rendered flora and fauna and urbanity that surrounds it. "The geese were/are gone in the style of poof," Mauch declares, but instantly, he yokes us back to the solitary joy all of us feel in this life when the speaker sings: "New me can’t get over how my engine sounds so goddamn happy idling." This is a marvelous book. – Alex Lemon, author of The Wish Book and Happy: A Memoir Matt Mauch’s poems do what the inventive brain does, whirling in and out of railings with the self, attempting to make sense of everyday life, the mundane reality up against the wild bird-self: the true mind. “The brain makes the hand reach / into the pocket that isn’t there / to pull out neither the petals of a rose, nor a rabbit from a hat,” he writes. His rough handling of beauty enhances beauty, just as his anti-titles—themselves mini-poems—enhance the idea of the poem. These are genuine, raw, sprawling poems that unveil the ghost self perfectly. – Bianca Stone, author of The Möbius Strip Club of Grief and Someone Else’s Wedding Vows Matt Mauch’s Bird~Brain documents a peculiar, because particular, seeing of the world, but as it documents, it acknowledges that not only is documenting inadequate to the world, it is inadequate even to the seeing of the world. And so at every moment, documenting threatens to overwhelm seeing, and every line of Mauch’s poems is flooded with words and turns, and yet every line is borne upon the understanding that the world can only be documented by an awe that cannot be spoken—the poetry, and there is rich poetry here, is in the effort to speak it. - Shane McCrae, author of In the Language of My Captor and The Animal Too Big to Kill |
IF YOU'RE LUCKY IS A THEORY OF MINE
(2012 open-reading period selection by Trio House Press editors)
"We would have missed the geese in the air if/not for the shadows of flying geese" conveys the spirit of this book and Matt Mauch's wonderful poems. His work is fundamentally devotional and embracing, driven, often breathlessly so, not so much to capture life as to make life, to create poems that have a pulse. His adoration and reverence are persuasive. This book is a tonic. This book is a joy.
– Bob Hicok
As a poet of uncommon charm and grace, Matt Mauch displays a mastery of metaphor in his second collection of poetry, easily transforming witty examinations of our turbulent lives into a rich deposit of music and delicious syntax. These poems showcase a rare understanding of how the everyday griefs and splendors of this world often converge, refreshing and reviving us. If You’re Lucky is a Theory of Mine is a testament to Mauch’s keen poetic talents and his buoyant imagination and heart.
– Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Imagine a Pan Galactic Gargleblaster of a poetic cocktail shaken and stirred with a jigger of Billy Bragg, a splash of Sun Ra, a shot of Desnos mowing the lawn, and a windowpane of Blake hurtling across the cloverleafed overpass as if it were one of the rings of Saturn. The ecstatic, speedballed meditations in Matt Mauch’s If You’re Lucky is a Theory of Mine morph and zoom in ribboned spirals that constantly take ouroboros-esque turns with quirk and verve. These poems are psychedelically gorgeous in their turns of language and musical momentum, and will repeatedly rocketship you to the unexpectedly trippy spaces of both the universal and the mundane.
– Lee Ann Roripaugh
(2012 open-reading period selection by Trio House Press editors)
"We would have missed the geese in the air if/not for the shadows of flying geese" conveys the spirit of this book and Matt Mauch's wonderful poems. His work is fundamentally devotional and embracing, driven, often breathlessly so, not so much to capture life as to make life, to create poems that have a pulse. His adoration and reverence are persuasive. This book is a tonic. This book is a joy.
– Bob Hicok
As a poet of uncommon charm and grace, Matt Mauch displays a mastery of metaphor in his second collection of poetry, easily transforming witty examinations of our turbulent lives into a rich deposit of music and delicious syntax. These poems showcase a rare understanding of how the everyday griefs and splendors of this world often converge, refreshing and reviving us. If You’re Lucky is a Theory of Mine is a testament to Mauch’s keen poetic talents and his buoyant imagination and heart.
– Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Imagine a Pan Galactic Gargleblaster of a poetic cocktail shaken and stirred with a jigger of Billy Bragg, a splash of Sun Ra, a shot of Desnos mowing the lawn, and a windowpane of Blake hurtling across the cloverleafed overpass as if it were one of the rings of Saturn. The ecstatic, speedballed meditations in Matt Mauch’s If You’re Lucky is a Theory of Mine morph and zoom in ribboned spirals that constantly take ouroboros-esque turns with quirk and verve. These poems are psychedelically gorgeous in their turns of language and musical momentum, and will repeatedly rocketship you to the unexpectedly trippy spaces of both the universal and the mundane.
– Lee Ann Roripaugh
CLICK HERE to order Matt Mauch's chapbook, The Brilliance of the Sparrow, from MONDO BUMMER.