Beginner's Guide to a Head-On Collision

Sebastian Matthews

ISBN 10: 1597096024 / ISBN 13: 9781597096027

Published by Red Hen Press, US, 2017

About this Item

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.

Seller Inventory # LU-9781597096027

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Beginner's Guide to a Head-On Collision
• Publisher: Red Hen Press, US
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1597096024
• ISBN 13: 9781597096027
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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

About the Author

Sebastian Matthews is the author of the poetry collection We Generous (Red Hen Press) and a memoir, In My Father’s Footsteps (W. W. Norton). He co-edited, with Stanley Plumly, Search Party: Collected Poems of William Matthews (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and New Hope for the Dead: Uncollected William Matthews. Matthews teaches at Warren Wilson College and serves on the faculty of the Queens College Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing program, as well as on the editorial board of Q Ave Press, makers of handmade poetry chapbooks. His work has appeared in journals such as the Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and Tin House.