Kirjahaku

William Matthews was a much-admired, award-winning poet and teacher who lived hard and died suddenly in 1997 at the age of fifty-five. He was a jazz fan, a wit and raconteur, a connoisseur of fine food and wine, and a thrice-married womanizer. This clear-eyed, often wryly funny memoir pays homage to a charismatic father as the son struggles to step out from his considerable shadow. In examining his father's death (and life), Sebastian Matthews explores his own chaotic past. A child of divorce, he was shuttled throughout his boyhood between parents and many geographies. In a confusing symbiotic time between Bill's marriages, the teenage son and his father were roommates and drinking buddies--I took care of him; he parented me. Later came the son's wanderings, the failed commitments. Finally Sebastian learns to confront Bill's mixed legacy. Striving to emulate the best of that sad, happy man, he discovers new definitions of home, love, and marriage.

New poetry from Pulitzer Prize nominated writer Sebastian Matthews.

In his first collection of poetry, We Generous, Sebastian Matthews illustrates black culture and music through soulful verse and poignant emotion. With poems reflective of the smooth rhythms of jazz, Matthews captures the essence and beauty of love, desire, and daily life.

Miracle Day: Mid-Life Songs, Sebastian MatthewsÆ second book of poems, explores the main themes of midlife—sex and death, marriage and parenthood, work and play, friends and foes, travel and staying put. Moving back and forth between couplets and the single-stanza poem, Matthews writes about the world he is immersed in, whether listening in on an impromptu barbershop quartet with his son or driving through urban Philadelphia on a misguided whim. Matthews continues his interest in jazz and musicians but has broadened his palate to include ruminations on everything from the 1948 summer session at Black Mountain College to Jack BennyÆs legendary corn-belt comedy routines.

In 2011, my family was in a major car accident. We were hit head-on by a man in the throes of a heart attack. It took three years to recover from our injuries, and a couple more to deal with the aftereffects of trauma. When I finally returned to the world — as father and husband, friend and brother, writer and citizen — it became clear that our society was in its own traumatized state — reeling from the string of police shootings of unarmed African Americans, stunned by yet one more mass shooting. The people around me were displaying all the signs of PTSD — jumpiness, irritability, numbness — and, concordantly, my interactions out in daily life were becoming more dysfunctional, at times downright hostile. Us against them. Red vs. blue. Black vs. white. Rich vs. poor. That we were living in a progressive town inside a conservative county in the Mountain South only made things more volatile. I decided that if we were all living in a fractured society no longer recognizable, then it was up to me to re-engage in it. I would enter into encounters with people as conscious as possible of the potential divides and misunderstandings between us. I started with my neighborhood and town, then moved out into the counties around us, then traveled further out into the country. My goal: to connect.

Beginner’s Guide to a Head-on Collision offers the deeply moving poetic memoir of Sebastian Matthews’s life in the years after the car accident that devastated him and his wife and son. The poems, which often read like electric improvised prayer-songs, intimately evoke the terrors and wonders of catastrophic physical injury and of ‘life re-booted.’ They are disturbing, eerie poems that embody the paradoxes of being The Dead Man at the crossing. They are amazingly honest in their hopeful, mystical sense of fate. In this unforgettable book, the reader is present at the scene of the accident where the hovering spirit that has departed the body addresses the living person re-entering his brokenness and answering for his transcendent awareness.”—Kevin McIlvoy

The Patient Body: A Personal Narrative in Pieces chronicles one man’s journey as he attempts to lead a balanced life as a father, husband, friend, and literary citizen during traumatic times. Written as a mosaic of ‘flash’ encounters, meditations, memories, and travel pieces, The Patient Body explores the ways the past resides inside the present and the present points to an uncertain future. An abecedary lies at the center of the book, composed for a former self, the twenty-six ‘micro’ sections create a dialogue that plays out across the divide created by a devastating car accident that changed everything.