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Rains Rain
Winner of the 2023 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize
In a dazzling array of forms, moods, and subjects, the poems in Matthew Roth’s Rains Rain explore the absurd and tender boundaries that separate desire and disaster. Again and again, the speakers in these poems discover the moment when control gives way to chaos, when the light of knowledge fails and one is left to make fateful decisions in the dark. By turns humorous, poignant, and sharply philosophical, Roth’s poems blend a keen-eyed honesty with disarming imaginative leaps. These poems resonate, their presence reverberating in the wake of the silence they leave behind.
In a dazzling array of forms, moods, and subjects, the poems in Matthew Roth’s Rains Rain explore the absurd and tender boundaries that separate desire and disaster. Again and again, the speakers in these poems discover the moment when control gives way to chaos, when the light of knowledge fails and one is left to make fateful decisions in the dark. By turns humorous, poignant, and sharply philosophical, Roth’s poems blend a keen-eyed honesty with disarming imaginative leaps. These poems resonate, their presence reverberating in the wake of the silence they leave behind.
80 pages, Paperback
First published February 6, 2023
4 people want to read
About the author
Matthew Roth
1 book3 followersMatthew Roth's books of poetry are Rains Rain (FutureCycle, 2023) and Bird Silence (Woodley, 2009). He teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Messiah University, in Grantham, PA.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 1, 2023
Of course I am completely biased, Matthew Roth being my favorite professor of poetry and creative writing from my days at Messiah, but I did wholly enjoy this collection of poetry from start to finish. It’s inspiring me to finally finish editing and formatting my most recent, cast-aside, dust-covered poetry collection.
Some favorites from the book: “The Peach Tree” (p. 10), “Without Us” (p. 18), “On Prayer” (p. 21), “Excess” (p. 36), “Extremities” (p. 52), “Relative Weight” (p. 64), and of COURSE, “Aftermath” (p. 67), which is written in the form I myself invented (“the Vaughnet”) in Roth’s Formal Poetry class, if you can believe it! What an honor 😁
Some favorites from the book: “The Peach Tree” (p. 10), “Without Us” (p. 18), “On Prayer” (p. 21), “Excess” (p. 36), “Extremities” (p. 52), “Relative Weight” (p. 64), and of COURSE, “Aftermath” (p. 67), which is written in the form I myself invented (“the Vaughnet”) in Roth’s Formal Poetry class, if you can believe it! What an honor 😁
January 2, 2024
We are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
Excerpts:
THE PEACH TREE
Because my daughter came home in tears
from the birthday party and could not be
consoled, I have taken her out to harvest
what’s left of the garden, whose splendor
has begun to run to rot and squalor
in the haze of August heat. Still,
the beanpoles stand bound and heavy
with knotted vines and here and there
a ripe tomato hangs ready for her hand
to grasp it, twist, and pull it free.
Why can’t I bear to ask her
what it was some other innocent
did or said, or didn’t do or didn’t say?
Instead, I try to keep her close and hope
our work together will be enough to make
the sting subside. But when I turn to look
for her she’s gone, running from me
towards the young peach, halfway up
the slope, where we planted it three years ago.
All summer we’ve watched amazed
the swelling fruit beneath whose weight
the slender branches bend, drooping at their ends.
Though they’ve turned to butter and crimson,
the peaches aren’t yet ripe, and I tell her
not to pick them but she pays no mind,
then yelps and comes to show me how
one side of the peach she holds in her hand
crawls with bugs who have eaten away
half the flesh, revealing the stone at its middle.
If we’re going to save them, we’ll have to
harvest now, before they are ready,
let them ripen the rest of the way inside.
We’ll have to lay them out on the table
by the window where, when she’s finally off
to bed, I’ll stand in the settling dark,
watching the evening rake its black loam
over the lawn and the garden going
to seed and then the solitary tree,
its free, unburdened branches bowed
as if still beneath that weight.
STARS
Still primitive, nosing the glade, making
tracks in the trackless, riparian rough,
mere mammals sussing the underbrush,
suspirious, inconsiderate of desire
or disaster, we starred the gulch
of moist maidenhair, impressed
them as we bedded down
in a brown wool blanket where
we twined, we mated, sure,
like porcupines beneath a porch
of midnight sky, siderealized and vulgar
as all mythic lovers, and I,
drunk on the dew of you,
brackened and salt-starved, swore
to myself, my first betrayal,
I’d never elegize the lithe,
unpunctuated arc of those first hours,
would not dissect with whetted words
our frowsy, fernlicked bodies, fused
in a moment’s outcry, though I knew,
even then I knew I lied, and just
outside the light of our fire already
I could hear the sibilant shiver,
the hushed, anticipatory hum,
of what we have, at last, become.
Excerpts:
THE PEACH TREE
Because my daughter came home in tears
from the birthday party and could not be
consoled, I have taken her out to harvest
what’s left of the garden, whose splendor
has begun to run to rot and squalor
in the haze of August heat. Still,
the beanpoles stand bound and heavy
with knotted vines and here and there
a ripe tomato hangs ready for her hand
to grasp it, twist, and pull it free.
Why can’t I bear to ask her
what it was some other innocent
did or said, or didn’t do or didn’t say?
Instead, I try to keep her close and hope
our work together will be enough to make
the sting subside. But when I turn to look
for her she’s gone, running from me
towards the young peach, halfway up
the slope, where we planted it three years ago.
All summer we’ve watched amazed
the swelling fruit beneath whose weight
the slender branches bend, drooping at their ends.
Though they’ve turned to butter and crimson,
the peaches aren’t yet ripe, and I tell her
not to pick them but she pays no mind,
then yelps and comes to show me how
one side of the peach she holds in her hand
crawls with bugs who have eaten away
half the flesh, revealing the stone at its middle.
If we’re going to save them, we’ll have to
harvest now, before they are ready,
let them ripen the rest of the way inside.
We’ll have to lay them out on the table
by the window where, when she’s finally off
to bed, I’ll stand in the settling dark,
watching the evening rake its black loam
over the lawn and the garden going
to seed and then the solitary tree,
its free, unburdened branches bowed
as if still beneath that weight.
STARS
Still primitive, nosing the glade, making
tracks in the trackless, riparian rough,
mere mammals sussing the underbrush,
suspirious, inconsiderate of desire
or disaster, we starred the gulch
of moist maidenhair, impressed
them as we bedded down
in a brown wool blanket where
we twined, we mated, sure,
like porcupines beneath a porch
of midnight sky, siderealized and vulgar
as all mythic lovers, and I,
drunk on the dew of you,
brackened and salt-starved, swore
to myself, my first betrayal,
I’d never elegize the lithe,
unpunctuated arc of those first hours,
would not dissect with whetted words
our frowsy, fernlicked bodies, fused
in a moment’s outcry, though I knew,
even then I knew I lied, and just
outside the light of our fire already
I could hear the sibilant shiver,
the hushed, anticipatory hum,
of what we have, at last, become.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews