Things We Don't Know We Don't Know by Matt Mason, $14.00 (includes postage).
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(The Backwaters Press), April 2006.
The book debuted at Number 12 on the May 28th poetryfoundation.org poetry best sellers list, between Ted Kooser and Mary Oliver!
Quotes about Things We Don't Know We Don't Know:"The only thing better than reading these poems is to hear Matt Mason himself read them."--Marjorie Saiser, author of Bones of a Very Fine Hand
"Matt Mason must be declared the poet laureate of the Midwest! No other native son celebrates the overlooked America, its unsung citizens (from the anonymous poets to the part-time English teachers), and its expansive indigenous landscape, as well as he does. Mason's poetry is humorous when he wants to be quirky, heartbreaking when he wants to be eloquent, and though he moves effortlessly into other moods and geographies, he always returns to his first and most enduring love (and to what he knows best)-his homeland."
"Although Mason takes his title from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's nonclarification of U.S. policy regarding "the war on terror," this exuberant poet helps us to see clearly a cornucopia of things we too often forget we know. Whether turning his attention to kiwifruit, Wild Kingdom's Marlin Perkins, the Strategic Air Command Museum, or lovers who with luck may come to resemble a no-expiration-date snack cake, Mason sheds some of his Nebraskan light on our universally human proceedings. And anyone who can actually say, for the poem-record, "I believe that aliens built the Pyramids, Stonehenge, / and most of my ex-girlfriends" surely knows, by heart, a few morethings we only think we may be better off not knowing."
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Now out, March 2005 from Lone Willow Press: a collection of poems written over the past fourteen years about my father's death.
Quotes about When The Bough Breaks:"Mason is a poet readers trust. He pulls us in with poems that are precise, moving, disturbing, and consoling."--Denise Duhamel, author of Queen for a Day.
"...powerful, self-searching poems..."
"Matt Mason is one of a handful of writers in any genre who's made me laugh till I cried and then, a heartbeat or two later, moved me to weep, not for the losses we inevitably suffer, but at the courage we necessarily muster to travel beyond our grief."
"...fresh and original in sensibility."
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A review in the Midwest Book Review.
Also reviewed in the Omaha World-Herald and The Reader.
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Published in February, 2003 by Morpo Press, it's 3 chapbooks in one, featuring many of the more popular Poetry Slam poems like "The Good News" (AKA: "Jesus"), "Definitive: Vermont," and "Masturbation."
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Published in September, 2002 by New Michigan Press, all purposefully off translations of Neruda's Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Cancion Desesperada. Read a review at Main Street Rag and The Reader. Read a poem at Verse Daily.
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Published in September, 2001 by the illustrious Morpo Press, contains the new, less Biblical poems which Mason's been working on the past couple years. |
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Published August of 1998. This book has poems like
"Spiced Pork Rinds" and "Freshness Dating"
as well as all of "On A Business Trip To Tampa"
and twelve new poems with cows in them. <Sample> |
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Published spring of 1997 and now on its fourth
printing. The Omaha World-Herald rates it "A hoot."
It contains poems such as "Nonviolent Resistance And A Cow,"
"When Cows Ruled The Earth," "Cows Never Smile,"
and "The Myth of La Belle Bovin Sans Merci." <Sample> |
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