Customer Reviews

Sad Little Breathing Machine: Poems

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

(Matthea Harvey read as part of the Writer's Voice Visiting Authors Series at the West Side YMCA on 8 December 2006. This was my introduction):

Matthea's Harvey's poetry is like going to a foreign country, and not knowing the language. Perhaps you stay a while. Eventually, words and phrases which pulled tantalizingly away from you at first, their sounds striking and bold, evocative and possessing an almost subconscious power, begin to coalesce.

Then, still with the breathtaking mystery of staying in a strange place, you may find you are able to gain some small entry into its true essence, while still maintaining the sense of wonder at something truly different.

Matthea Harvey's poetry rewards the effort, involvement and attention of the reader. Her language is fresh and unusual in the best sense--without contrivance or petty literary gamesmanship. She has the ability to stimulate the reader's mind, and to suddenly swoop in, hit directly in the gut by creating shocking, unpredictable connections. The work is alive and moving on the page, vibrant, ever-opening, capable of astonishing power and emotional force, while never being melodramatic--the exactitude of Matthea's language will not allow it--and of course, the work remains stunningly original.

There are some interesting prose poems, wacky skewed narratives with surrealist wit.

When I read the rest of the poems, I found them frustratingly incomprehensible, even compared to other contemporary poetry. I did, however, enjoy discussing them with friends, reading them aloud and trying to come up with even a hint of what they might be trying to do.

I had never heard of Matthea Harvey when I picked up her book and flipped through it. But it didn't matter whether I heard her name before or not, her poems grabbed me by the cheeks and slammed my face into the pages. I instantly fell hard for this book and bought it on the spot. I love her style. She's fresh and smart. This is a happy book of poems that makes me laugh in full-fledged giddiness and awe at such wit, such brilliance. Matthea is like a slurpee with a hot pink bendy straw, and I mean that in the best sense of the word. Ahhh! Refreshing and uplifting. My new favorite poet. My favorite part? The first two lines of "Introduction to a Diction:" Galoshless. I / stood by the river, all ashiver. Gosh I was hoping for liver.

This book is wonderful -- clever, sincere, brilliant, hilarious, and heartfelt. Ms. Harvey's poetic world is populated by strange and amazing creatures (the 1st person; the cake-like baby; the lovely, cold princesses) that draw the reader in and make us wish the book would never end...

I read this book in a few different places, and if all those places ran together it would make this place; a train on the edge of my bed until the power went out at Asawa in a beanbag chair while talking on the phone at work on my lunchbreak before jogging in a taxi to the train.

Take it with you -- it's a great book of poems.

I think Harvey has done the impossible: written a very good sophmore effort. Funny and smart, the way poetry should read out of the academic efforts of current young writers.

Funny, witty, clever, short and knife through the heart good.