Black Aperture

Rasmussen, Matt

ISBN 10: 080715086X / ISBN 13: 9780807150863

Published by LSU Press, Baton Rouge, 2013

About this Item

Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 72 p. Audience: General/trade. No previous owner's name. Clean, tight pages. No bent corners. No remainder mark. SC 355.

Seller Inventory # Alibris.0055596

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Black Aperture
• Publisher: LSU Press, Baton Rouge
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080715086X
• ISBN 13: 9780807150863
• Binding: Trade paperback
• Condition: Fine.

About this title

Synopsis

2013 National Book Award Finalist
In his moving debut collection, Matt Rasmussen faces the tragedy of his brother’s suicide, refusing to focus on the expected pathos, blurring the edge between grief and humor. In “Outgoing,” the speaker erases his brother’s answering machine message to save his family from “the shame of dead you / answering calls.” In other poems, once-ordinary objects become dreamlike. A buried light bulb blooms downward, “a flower / of smoldering filaments.” A refrigerator holds an evening landscape, “a tinfoil lake,” “vegetables / dying in the crisper.” Destructive and redemptive, Black Aperture opens to the complicated entanglements of mourning: damage and healing, sorrow and laughter, and torment balanced with moments of relief.

About the Author

Matt Rasmussen’s poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, H_NGM_N, and at Poets.org. A founding coeditor of Birds LLC, a small, independent poetry press, he is a 2012–2013 McKnight Artist Fellow and teaches at Gustavus Adolphus College.