Kirjahaku

At the center of Mayakovsky’s Revolver is the suicide of Matthew Dickman’s older brother. “Known for poems of universality of feeling, expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending allure” (Major Jackson), Dickman is a powerful poet whose new collection explores how to persevere in the wake of grief. from “Mayakovsky’s Revolver” I keep thinking about the way blackberries will make the mouth of an eight year old look like he’s a ghost that’s been shot in the face. In the dark I can see my older brother walking through the tall brush of his brain. I can see him standing in the lobby of the hotel, alone, crying along with the ice machine.

At the center of Mayakovsky’s Revolver is the suicide of Matthew Dickman’s older brother. “Known for poems of universality of feeling, expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending allure” (Major Jackson), Dickman is a powerful poet whose new collection explores how to persevere in the wake of grief. from “Mayakovsky’s Revolver” I keep thinking about the way blackberries will make the mouth of an eight year old look like he’s a ghost that’s been shot in the face. In the dark I can see my older brother walking through the tall brush of his brain. I can see him standing in the lobby of the hotel, alone, crying along with the ice machine.

Luminous and hypnotic, this dynamic collection explores the dark edges of childhood, violence, race, class, and masculinity. "Tender and troubling, dark and glowing. . . . [F]ull of glimpses of sudden violence and hidden traumas, which often simultaneously mix with tenderness, love and indeed a certain sense of wonder." - San Francisco Chronicle

"Known for poems of universality of feeling, expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending allure" (Major Jackson), award-winning poet Matthew Dickman returns with a collection that engages the traces of his own living past, suffusing these poems with ghosts of longing, shame, and vulnerability. In the southeast Portland neighborhood of Dickman's youth, parents are out of control and children are in chaos. With grief, anger, and, ultimately, understanding, Dickman confronts a childhood of ambient violence, well-intentioned but warped family relations, confining definitions of identity, and the deprivation of this particular Portland neighborhood in the 1980s. Wonderland reminds us that, while these neighborhoods are filled with guns, skateboards, fights, booze, and heroin, and home to punk rockers, skinheads, poor kids, and single moms, they are also places of innocence and love.

Winner of the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award."Matthew Dickman's all-American poems are the epitome of the pleasure principle; as clever as they are, they refuse to have ulterior intellectual pretensions; really, I think, they are spiritual in character--free and easy and unself-conscious, lusty, full of sensuous aspiration. . . . We turn loose such poets into our culture so that they can provoke the rest of us into saying everything on our minds."--Tony Hoagland, APR/Honickman First Book Prize judgeDickman crystallizes and celebrates human contact, reminding us...that our best memories, those most worth holding on to, those that might save us, will be memories of love....The background, then, is a downbeat America resolutely of the moment; the style, though, looks back to the singing free verse of Walt Whitman and Frank O'Hara....(Dickman's) work sings with all the crazy vereve of the West. --Los Angeles TimesToughness with a smile....(Dickman) breathes the air of Whitman, Kerouac, O'Hara, and Koch, each of whom pushed against the grain of what poetry and writing was supposed to be in their times. --New Haven ReviewAll American Poem plumbs the ecstatic nature of our daily lives. In these unhermetic poems, pop culture and the sacred go hand in hand. As Matthew Dickman said in an interview, he wants the "people from the community that I come from"--a blue-collar neighborhood in Portland, Oregon--to get his poems. "Also, I decided to include anything I wanted in my poems. . . . Pepsi, McDonald's, the word 'ass.'"There is no one to save usbecause there is no need to be saved.I've hurt you. I've loved you. I've mowedthe front yard. When the stranger wearing a sheer white dresscovered in a million beadsslinks toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life, I take her hand in mine. I spin her outand bring her in. This is the almond grovein the dark slow dance.It is what we should be doing right now. Scrapingfor joy . . .Matthew Dickman is the winner of the May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a poetry editor of Tin House, and the coauthor, with brother Michael Dickman, of 50 American Plays. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Guided by acclaimed poet Matthew Dickman's signature "clarity and ability to engage" (David Kirby, New York Times), Husbandry is a love song from a father to his children. Written after a separation and during overwhelming single-fatherhood in the early days of COVID-19 lockdowns, Husbandry refuses romantic notions of parenting and embraces all its mess, anguish, humor, fear, boredom, and warmth.Dickman composes these poems entirely in vivid couplets that animate the various domestic pairs of broken-up parents, two sons, love and grief. He explores the terrain of his children's dreams and nightmares, the almost primal fears that spill into his own, and the residual impacts of his parents' failures. Threading his anxieties with bright moments of beauty and gratitude, the volume delights in seeing the world through the clear eyes of childhood and finds meaning in the domestic work--repetitive, exhausting, and sublime--of sustaining three lives.With tender, aching precision, Husbandry reveals the poet's hunger to be a husband without ever being one, and his search for a father that ends with becoming one himself.

Guided by acclaimed poet Matthew Dickman's signature "clarity and ability to engage" (David Kirby, New York Times), Husbandry is a love song from a father to his children. Written after a separation and during overwhelming single-fatherhood in the early days of COVID-19 lockdowns, Husbandry refuses romantic notions of parenting and embraces all its mess, anguish, humor, fear, boredom, and warmth.Dickman composes these poems entirely in vivid couplets that animate the various domestic pairs of broken-up parents, two sons, love and grief. He explores the terrain of his children's dreams and nightmares, the almost primal fears that spill into his own, and the residual impacts of his parents' failures. Threading his anxieties with bright moments of beauty and gratitude, the volume delights in seeing the world through the clear eyes of childhood and finds meaning in the domestic work--repetitive, exhausting, and sublime--of sustaining three lives.With tender, aching precision, Husbandry reveals the poet's hunger to be a husband without ever being one, and his search for a father that ends with becoming one himself.

A dual-authored volume of poems from the multi-award winning Dickman twins - leading voices in America's outstanding generation of younger poets.Although the brothers extol differing inspirations (Matthew writes with the ebullience of Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Michael with the control of William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson), they are unified by the unflinching, remarkable verse they wrote when their older sibling tragically took his own life. It is these moving, grieving but life-affirming poems that solely comprise this dual-authored volume. Published in an inventive tête-bêche edition, the poems appear head-to-toe, communing in the middle, making Brother a searing but ultimately up-lifting journey of grief, love and family.'Michael's poems are interior, fragmentary, and austere, often stripped down to single-word lines; they seethe with incipient violence. Matthew's are effusive, ecstatic, and all-embracing, spilling over with pop-cultural references and exuberant carnality . . . together, the resonance of the work is amplified.' New YorkerMatthew Dickman is the author of All-American Poem (2008), 50 American Plays (co-written with his twin brother Michael Dickman, 2012), Mayakovsky's Revolver (2012),Wish You Were Here (2013) and 24 HOURS (2014). He is the recipient of The May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Kate Tufts Award from Claremont College and a 2015 Guggenheim award. Matthew Dickman is the Poetry Editor of Tin House magazine. He lives in Portland, Oregon.Michael Dickman is the author of three books of poems, The End of the West (2009), Flies (2011, Winner of the James Laughlin Award), and Green Migraine (2015), as well as a book of plays, 50 American Plays, co-written with his twin brother, Matthew Dickman, in 2012. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is on the faculty at Princeton University.

Their verse . . . is strikingly different. Michael's poems are interior, fragmentary, and austere, often stripped down to single-word lines; they seethe with incipient violence. Matthew's are effusive, ecstatic, and all-embracing, spilling over with pop-cultural references and exuberant carnality. --The New YorkerIdentical twins Michael and Matthew Dickman once invented their own language. Now they have invented an exhilarating book of poem-plays about the fifty states. Pointed, comic, and surreal, these one-page vignettes feature unusual staging and an eclectic cast of characters--landforms, lobsters, and historical figures including Duke Ellington, Sacajawea, Judy Garland, and Kenneth Koch, the avant-garde spirit informing this book introduced by playwright John Guare.Lucky in KansasJudy Garland: This is always the worst partTin Man: The coming backJudy Garland: Yes, it fucking sucks, it's depressing as shitThe Lion: Well, we're lucky to still be employed at this farmStraw Man: I wouldn't call it luckyThe Lion: We were lucky to get backStraw Man: That's not really lucky either I don't think you know what lucky meansJudy Garland: It's funny what you missTin Man: The runningJudy Garland: The flyingTin Man: The flying monkeysJudy Garland: The beautiful flying monkeys above the endless emeralds the unbelievably green worldMichael Dickman and Matthew Dickman are identical twins who were born and raised in Portland, Oregon. Michael received the 2010 James Laughlin Award for his second collection Flies (Copper Canyon Press, 2011). Matthew won the prestigious APR/Honickman Award for his debut volume, All-American Poem.