Satellite - Softcover

Rohrer, Matthew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0970367236 ISBN 13: 9780970367235

Publisher: Wave Books, 2004

Synopsis

In this follow-up collection to the National Poetry Series winner A Hummock in the Malookas, Rohrer’s poems play against convention, finding dark, surreal underpinnings in the seemingly innocent objects and experiences of everyday life. Direct, humorous and disquieting, Satellite further develops the unique sensibility of an important young poet.

About this title

About the Author

Matthew Rohrer was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew up in Oklahoma. He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, University College Dublin, and the University of Michigan, where he won the Avery Hopwood Award for poetry. His first book, A Hummock in the Malookas, was a winner of the National Poetry Series and chosen as a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1995. Mary Oliver called his work "beautiful and disquieting," and Harvard Review notes that his poems are "everywhere marked by freshness and originality." He has appeared on NPR's All Things Considered - The Book Show, and is a poetry editor of Fence.

Reviews

Laundromats, oddball flora, a toy tomahawk, "many falling rats," a "robotroid girlfriend" and a series of twice-told childhood stories distinguish the determinedly eccentric, sometimes winning poems in Rohrer's second volume. Like his sometime models Charles Simic and James Tate, Rohrer (A Hummock in the Malookas) seeks out surreally menacing objects, finding a disturbing, even deceptive emptiness amid his seemingly ordinary "brick houses" and heterosexual couples, making accomplished phrases to match their disorientations: "In the middle garden is the secret wedding," he says, "that hides always under the other one/ and under the shiny things of the other one." A giddy suspicion like that of schoolchildren's pranks sometimes matches, and sometimes overwhelms, the poems' attempts at offhand social critique; topics include male sexual anxiety and postmodern self-consciousness … la Dave Eggers: "No man is an island. Also, no one is interested/ in excessive indeterminacy." Rohrer's hip titles ("Alternatives to Pain"; "Starfish Waving to Me from the Sand") and tricky allusions (Ashbery, Longfellow, William Blake, Woody Allen) can over-determine the poems they introduce, but their facility and charm usually step in and smooth things over. (May) Forecast: One of the poetry editors of Fence, onetime acting managing director of the Poetry Society of America and currently publicity/events director at the Academy of American Poets, Rohrer has deep roots in the po-biz, which will distinguish him from his contemporaries.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wave Books
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0970367236
• ISBN 13: 9780970367235
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 86