Kirjahaku

POEMS AND OTHER PROSE ON POETRY BY Kyle McCord - Jenny Yang Cropp - Glenn Shaheen - Matthew Guenette - Jim Coppoc - Ian Beattie - Matt Ryan - MC Hyland - Rebecca Lehmann - Bruce Covey - John Colburn - Morgan Grace Willow - Betsy Brown - Deborah Keenan - Gary Dop - John Medeiros - Richard Robbins - Jeff Skemp - Traci Brimhall - Paula Cisewski - Carrie Lorig - Paige Reihl - Luke Pingel - Haley Lasch - Kara Candito - Erik Tschekunow - Cary Waterman - Lee Ann Roripaugh - Kris Bigalk - Heid Erdrich - Leslie Adrienne Miller - Adrianne Mathiowetz - Ryan Collins - Lewis Mundt - Carol Connolly - Juliet Patterson - Seth Berg - Feng Sun Chen - Ryan Vine - Kelly Everding - Lightsey Darst - Dylan Hicks - Brian Spears - Sharon Chmielarz - Adam Fell - Dobby Gibson - John Jodzio - Michael Walsh - Lynette Reini-Grandell - John Bradley - Su Smallen - Kathryn Kysar - Amy McCann - Matt Mauch -

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 SpectacleReading 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

Matt Mauch's A Northern Spring transcends genre and form to depict splinters of humanity under the duress of plague and political destruction. Through lyrical prose and poetry, this unique chronicle of spring 2020 navigates what it means to live a fractured human existence in the midst and wake of world demands and individual desires-and needs-for endurance. A Northern Spring begins in Northern Ireland, on the evening when the US president announces that travel has been banned from Europe due to the recently declared pandemic. It ends in a different north that same spring: Minneapolis during the last week of May, a city just learning of and responding to the murder by police of George Floyd. Among many of Mauch's signature capturings of the astonishing brevity of happiness, joy is described as "the mirage of water a playing field ahead of you on a summer road." Indeed, the poet's self-awarenesses continually challenge the too-easy ways humans, cloaked by obligation, duty, and designs for different futures, disregard lived moments-the now-as lesser than. Just as a season, especially in regional spheres enveloped for months in the brutal chill of winter, inspires revolution in its bringing of warmth, its demand of rebirth, A Northern Spring seeks to illustrate, via a poet's navigation of things that feel brand new, a metamorphosing society and world made smaller by reminders of their collective divisions, their collective oneness.