Pretty, Rooster

Pretty, Rooster features original comics from Shannon Wheeler (Too Much Coffee Man) and Micah Farritor (White Picket Fences & Night Trippers), with other visual stimulations by Max Xiantu. Jason Schneiderman, author of Striking Surface, writes: You don't read these poems as much as you tumble through them. The pleasures of sound and sense are so perfectly calibrated that each of these sonnets wants to be read at least twice. The sonnet was invented as a vehicle for self-examination, and Matthews takes that literally, driving each one like it had a manual transmission. His discoveries are simultaneously comforting and unsettling, love always inflecting life, and life always inflectiing love.

Clay Matthews has published two previous full-length collections: Superfecta (Ghost Road Press, 2008) and Runoff (BlazeVox Books, 2009). He's also published a couple chapbooks, and a handful of poems and etc. in journals such as The American Poetry Review, Willow Springs, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. He completed his Ph.D. in creative writing at Oklahoma State in 2008, and he's now teaching at Tusculum College outside of Greeneville, TN, where he also edits poetry for The Tusculum Review. He's got some poems floating around out there in the internet he'd love for you to look up and introduce yourself to, and he always enjoys hearing from folks.