Gold Cure

From gold rushes to black gold, these elegiac poems place a glimmering mirror between resource extraction and utopian dreaming, exploitation and emotional longing.

Lustrous, tender, and expansive, Gold Cure moves from boomtown gold mines and the mythical city of El Dorado to the fracking wells of the American interior, excavating buried histories, legacies of conquest, and the pursuit of shimmering ideals. Ted Mathys skewers police brutality in a 16-part poem built on the bones of a nursery rhyme and drives Petrarchan sonnets into shale fields deep under the prairies. In crystalline language rich with allegory and wordplay, Mathys has crafted a moving elegy for the Anthropocene.

Ted Mathys is the author of three previous books of poetry, Null Set, The Spoils, and Forge, all from Coffee House Press. The recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Poetry Society of America, his work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, BOMB, Boston Review, Conjunctions, PBS NewsHour and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and lives in Saint Louis, where he teaches at Saint Louis University and curates the 100 Boots Poetry Series at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.