What do you think?
Rate this book
Mayakovsky's Revolver
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Poetry (2012)From a dazzling, award-winning young poet, a collection that paints life as a celebration in the dark.
At the center of Mayakovsky’s Revolver is the suicide of Matthew Dickman’s older brother. “Known for poems of universality of feeling, expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending allure” (Major Jackson), Dickman is a powerful poet whose new collection explores how to persevere in the wake of grief.
At the center of Mayakovsky’s Revolver is the suicide of Matthew Dickman’s older brother. “Known for poems of universality of feeling, expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending allure” (Major Jackson), Dickman is a powerful poet whose new collection explores how to persevere in the wake of grief.
- GenresPoetryContemporary
94 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2012
About the author
Matthew Dickman
19 books114 followersMatthew Dickman is an American poet. He and his identical twin brother, Michael Dickman, also a poet, were born in Portland, Oregon.
Dickman has received fellowships from The Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, The Vermont Studio Center, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
He is the author of three chapbooks, Amigos, Something about a Black Scarf and Wish You Were Here, and three full-length poetry collections. His first book, All-American Poem, was winner of the 2008 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry, published by American Poetry Review and distributed by Copper Canyon Press. He was also the winner of the 2009 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for that book, and the inaugural May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. His second full collection of poetry, Mayakovsky's Revolver, was published by W. W. Norton and Company in 2012. He is also the coauthor with his brother, of the 2012 poetry collection 50 American Plays, also published by Copper Canyon Press, and the 2016 Brother, a collection of poems on their half-brother's suicide. His third collection, Wonderland, was published in 2018 by Norton.
His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Clackamas Literary Review, AGNI Online, The Missouri Review, and The New Yorker.
Dickman has received fellowships from The Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, The Vermont Studio Center, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
He is the author of three chapbooks, Amigos, Something about a Black Scarf and Wish You Were Here, and three full-length poetry collections. His first book, All-American Poem, was winner of the 2008 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry, published by American Poetry Review and distributed by Copper Canyon Press. He was also the winner of the 2009 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for that book, and the inaugural May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. His second full collection of poetry, Mayakovsky's Revolver, was published by W. W. Norton and Company in 2012. He is also the coauthor with his brother, of the 2012 poetry collection 50 American Plays, also published by Copper Canyon Press, and the 2016 Brother, a collection of poems on their half-brother's suicide. His third collection, Wonderland, was published in 2018 by Norton.
His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Clackamas Literary Review, AGNI Online, The Missouri Review, and The New Yorker.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 70 reviews
March 25, 2019
Fantastic.
May 6, 2017
Matthew Dickman clearly realizes what many contemporary poets do not—that a poem must be musical in order properly to be called poetry. That said, he fails to realize what the great poets all knew intuitively—that to be deep, a poem must explore spiritual themes, not merely physical or emotional ones. Some of the language in Mayakovsky's Revolver is beautiful, but it seems as if Dickman believes beauty itself is spiritual reality rather than a reflection of it.
In the poem "Gas Station," Dickman describes a chance encounter with a gunman. The gunman, he says, had a face "like an apartment that no one had lived in for years" (pg. 18). Moments like these are worth the wait, though by the end of the book I'd had enough of them. It sounds great, but there's not much behind it. Dickman writes from pain, which makes for good poetry, but his pain is forced to live in a world without souls and therefore begins to fall flat after a time.
By the time I got to the last two poems I was ready for the book to be over. The erotic poem "Getting It Right," in which the author's lover is described and compared to many things, was as stale as a cup of root beer from two nights ago left uncovered on the counter. The longish poem "On Earth" was like a Billy Collins poem—initially very pretty, but ultimately repetitive and verbose. I felt very much like I was reading my own attempts at Whitman or Ginsberg from twenty years ago.
As a poet, Dickman shows promise. He's young, so maybe future collections will adopt a more spiritual tone, and less of the put-on seriousness he seems to have channeled from fellow Portlander Elliott Smith. I'll read whatever he puts out (he is a fellow Portlander, after all), but until he breaks the current mold of contemporary poetry and rediscovers what made Blake, Donne, and Milton great, he will be relegated to the ranks of "pretty good" rather than "without peer."
In the poem "Gas Station," Dickman describes a chance encounter with a gunman. The gunman, he says, had a face "like an apartment that no one had lived in for years" (pg. 18). Moments like these are worth the wait, though by the end of the book I'd had enough of them. It sounds great, but there's not much behind it. Dickman writes from pain, which makes for good poetry, but his pain is forced to live in a world without souls and therefore begins to fall flat after a time.
By the time I got to the last two poems I was ready for the book to be over. The erotic poem "Getting It Right," in which the author's lover is described and compared to many things, was as stale as a cup of root beer from two nights ago left uncovered on the counter. The longish poem "On Earth" was like a Billy Collins poem—initially very pretty, but ultimately repetitive and verbose. I felt very much like I was reading my own attempts at Whitman or Ginsberg from twenty years ago.
As a poet, Dickman shows promise. He's young, so maybe future collections will adopt a more spiritual tone, and less of the put-on seriousness he seems to have channeled from fellow Portlander Elliott Smith. I'll read whatever he puts out (he is a fellow Portlander, after all), but until he breaks the current mold of contemporary poetry and rediscovers what made Blake, Donne, and Milton great, he will be relegated to the ranks of "pretty good" rather than "without peer."
January 25, 2022
read in one sitting
November 30, 2024
something bugs me about the similes, it’s like the similes is what the poem is formed around yet also… is kind of dropped in their haphazardly??
January 9, 2026
Impressive. An important part of the book is dedicated to his older brother who, like the Russian poet Mayakovsky, killed himself.
Because I miss you I have made a pile of clothes
along the bed, your exact height and weight. I've invented
you for a night! I put the dumbbells
of my hands around the sweater that's your waist and let them
fall asleep there. The moon is in the yard
floating through the blinds, becoming a zebra
with glowing stripes, asleep on the floor.
Because I miss you I have made a pile of clothes
along the bed, your exact height and weight. I've invented
you for a night! I put the dumbbells
of my hands around the sweater that's your waist and let them
fall asleep there. The moon is in the yard
floating through the blinds, becoming a zebra
with glowing stripes, asleep on the floor.
October 4, 2012
Full of melancholy and imagery that frequently quivers to life, Mayakovsky's Revolver is a sturdy well-crafted collection of poems. My favorites are the sweetly romantic Weird Science, the dark childhood depicted in Elegy to a Goldfish, and the amazing (and uplifting) closer, On Earth. Also--lots of cool Portland references throughout.
March 27, 2016
I'm actually inspired to write a book character that fits for one of my favorite poems in this book. Awesome. I wish I owned it instead of just having it as a library book, and that is definitely a success.
April 29, 2018
“On earth/ survival is built out of luck and treatment centers/or slow like a planet being born, before/ there was anyone to survive,/the gases of the Big Bang just settling, or it’s built/ falling, and some safe in the scaffold, up above the earth,/unwrapping the sandwiches the have been waiting all day to eat.”
July 29, 2022
My favorite poetry collection of all time.
April 4, 2023
Love love love the titular poem but when he wrote he knew the moon was Japanese wearing a white kimono for no reason I knew my man Dickman was going to lose a few points
September 25, 2015
This collection was just okay for me. A handful of the poems were really powerful and made me want to go back and reread them several times. More often, though, the poems kind of washed over me without leaving any real impression or started out promising but ended up disappointing. A lot of them felt half-finished while others seemed a tad too obvious and heavy-handed in their themes. Maybe the style was just too casual and conversational for me, as often, I found myself thinking that some of the language choices were lazy or lacking any real presence. I also found myself struggling to relate to the poems that seemed to center on super-specific, super-personal experiences without really succeeding at giving them a universal angle. I do want to stress that when it was on, it was really on; this just didn't happen often enough for my liking. Recommended: "In Heaven," "Gas Station," "Blue Sky," "Field," "Get It Right."
June 27, 2013
Some beautiful and painful observations (mostly about childhood), some clumsy revelations ("the moon is wearing a white kimono that covers most of her legs. I always knew she was Japanese!") and a few intimate whisperings that are just trying too hard ("Your ass is a shopping mall at Christmas, a holy place, a hill I fell in love with once when I was falling in love with hills.")
April 5, 2015
If Billy Collins had a son, he would be Matthew Dickman. That might be a bit of an overstatement ... for now. Dickman's poetry is electric, alive and celebratory. So much so that the lines literally crackle and jump off the page to grab me by the collar. Great stuff here; well worth the time. My favorites in this one were "Coffee" and "On Earth" but they all are darn good.
February 9, 2013
And not just because I am contractually obliged to like Matthew's book. His wide-eyed sincerity and all its exclamation points are desperately needed in Poetryland.
March 17, 2026
A new favorite for sure.
June 14, 2021
A large number of the poems in this book are Dickman's attempt to come to terms with the death of his twin brother. In truth, many washed over me and I struggled to fully connect with Dickman's chatty tone of voice.
The exception to this was the wonderful 'The Madness of King George', a poem that centres Dickman himself, rather than his brother. It's rivetting.
The Madness of King George
It was time for me to go. I drank
a beer and a whiskey and should have been sipping
Italian sodas, should have been home
watching an old movie
or reading Twain but I decided to feed my limitations
instead. Get a little drunk. Get a little sad.
The woman sitting next to me calls herself Summer
and keeps touching her lips
and scratching her thigh
and ordering a martini
and talking about history. George Washington
and the madness of King George. “He would walk around
the palace garden wearing nothing
but his crown, crying, holding his gaudy scepter in his hands
like an infant.” I am like him, I thought,
and ask for my bill
while this other person, this other
life puts her hand on my knee. “Do you ever think
about what would have happened if Germany won the war?”
she says. Street signs in two languages.
The Jews really gone. And the Mormons too. Oktoberfest
everywhere. I can see the line
her underwear is making beneath the gray silk. I can see
the wash of freckles on her shoulders.
This is what loneliness is all about. A table
full of bread and wine and you starving but unable to eat or drink,
just staring at it like you were staring
at a television set. “I think Amelia Earhart is alive and living
in Florida... there are pictures of her
walking on the beach.” Her and Elvis and the Kennedy Brothers.
History getting undead
and moving to warmer climates. I am peering out
from my own grave,
I think, and pay my tab. I put my coat on
and Summer is sliding her long index finger around the rim
of her glass and then licking it. “This economy,”
she says,“the price of gas!... It’s almost like we’re living
in wartime” I am closing my wallet.
I am stepping away from the bar,
looking at her, stranger now than when we met an hour ago,
when I first noticed her neck, her breasts. “But we are,” I say,
“We are living in wartime”
And then her finger stops and she looks up at me and says “Oh, I know,
but I mean really, really at war, you know like here, where you and I are.”
The exception to this was the wonderful 'The Madness of King George', a poem that centres Dickman himself, rather than his brother. It's rivetting.
The Madness of King George
It was time for me to go. I drank
a beer and a whiskey and should have been sipping
Italian sodas, should have been home
watching an old movie
or reading Twain but I decided to feed my limitations
instead. Get a little drunk. Get a little sad.
The woman sitting next to me calls herself Summer
and keeps touching her lips
and scratching her thigh
and ordering a martini
and talking about history. George Washington
and the madness of King George. “He would walk around
the palace garden wearing nothing
but his crown, crying, holding his gaudy scepter in his hands
like an infant.” I am like him, I thought,
and ask for my bill
while this other person, this other
life puts her hand on my knee. “Do you ever think
about what would have happened if Germany won the war?”
she says. Street signs in two languages.
The Jews really gone. And the Mormons too. Oktoberfest
everywhere. I can see the line
her underwear is making beneath the gray silk. I can see
the wash of freckles on her shoulders.
This is what loneliness is all about. A table
full of bread and wine and you starving but unable to eat or drink,
just staring at it like you were staring
at a television set. “I think Amelia Earhart is alive and living
in Florida... there are pictures of her
walking on the beach.” Her and Elvis and the Kennedy Brothers.
History getting undead
and moving to warmer climates. I am peering out
from my own grave,
I think, and pay my tab. I put my coat on
and Summer is sliding her long index finger around the rim
of her glass and then licking it. “This economy,”
she says,“the price of gas!... It’s almost like we’re living
in wartime” I am closing my wallet.
I am stepping away from the bar,
looking at her, stranger now than when we met an hour ago,
when I first noticed her neck, her breasts. “But we are,” I say,
“We are living in wartime”
And then her finger stops and she looks up at me and says “Oh, I know,
but I mean really, really at war, you know like here, where you and I are.”
February 9, 2020
Although much of this book is dark, dealing with a brother's death and family disfunction, the overall effect of the book is, I think, exuberant! And it is a measure of Dickman's abilities, by the force of his direct language ornamented by often memorable metaphor, that the exuberance rises out of everything else. Dickman loves his family, yet he understands how that love -- and the love to the world that comes with it -- often isn't enough to actually help anyone, including the poet.
His sympathies are with the dead, his own dead and many of the dead poets. Dickman believes in poetry! Believes it is important and that it is a way of understanding. He brings the poets into his own life -- from his title to Akhmatova to Jack Spicer and on to all of his friends.
But these poems are not difficult. Yes, he will sometimes jump through time or deep into the personal, and he expects the reader to jump with him. But those jumps are not impossible, and they are often exciting.
He creates narratives of his experience, yet those stories don't usually feel self-indulgent. As I've looked back, I thinks he is saved by that by his self-deprecation. He never lets himself off the hook.
His sympathies are with the dead, his own dead and many of the dead poets. Dickman believes in poetry! Believes it is important and that it is a way of understanding. He brings the poets into his own life -- from his title to Akhmatova to Jack Spicer and on to all of his friends.
But these poems are not difficult. Yes, he will sometimes jump through time or deep into the personal, and he expects the reader to jump with him. But those jumps are not impossible, and they are often exciting.
He creates narratives of his experience, yet those stories don't usually feel self-indulgent. As I've looked back, I thinks he is saved by that by his self-deprecation. He never lets himself off the hook.
December 13, 2018
I’m torn over this book. On one hand, the imagery is really spot on. I wish I could think of metaphors and similes like he does. But there were so many poems that didn’t make me feel a thing...I just finished them and kinda shrugged. Maybe it was because there was so much going on in every poem that the emotional impact was lessened. The poem “Pants” was probably my favorite. Be aware that this is stream-of-consciousness poetry, so if you don’t dig that you probably won’t like this.
January 6, 2020
Skaityti liūdniausią ir bene asmeniškiausią Dickmano rinkinį – lyg ryžtis eiti į pasimatymą su mirtimi: romantiška, aštru, jaudina, bet sykiu truputį baisu ir be proto liūdna. Tokie ir patys tekstai – kartais (savi)ironiškai naivūs, kartais kiek saldūs, bet beveik visada primenantys, kad pabaigos ne visuomet būna laimingos. Nepaisant to, gyvenimas ir toliau tęsiasi, o gyvieji tūno baruose, mėgindami susivokti, kas ir kaip.
November 4, 2024
I enjoyed these. A friend of mine recommended this book when my dad died last year and I finally read it. This definitely echos the festering feelings of grief. A lot of the poems had a consistent fever-dream feel that I enjoyed. The last poem, of course, was gut wrenching.
I felt a physical aversion to the Bridge poem. Maybe that’s art and it’s supposed to make you uncomfortable.
Poems that stuck with me were- 4. More than one life and 6- Satellite, and Weird Science.
I felt a physical aversion to the Bridge poem. Maybe that’s art and it’s supposed to make you uncomfortable.
Poems that stuck with me were- 4. More than one life and 6- Satellite, and Weird Science.
July 6, 2025
As the author describes being on the bridge looking at the things below with no one to stop or an angel ripped from "It's a Wonderful Life", I can't help but ponder some objects of Beauty: "Halcion" - "Being ready by not being" - "A father toasting the children he never knew". Patience is not rewarded - perhaps if one stitched together the scraps of beauty there would be a creation of magnificence - but even its Frankenstein monster would stand against this motley collection.
April 29, 2026
Der direkte Stil und die lebendigen Bilder sind definitiv ein Pluspunkt. Gleichzeitig wirkten manche Metaphern auf mich etwas erzwungen oder nicht ganz ausgearbeitet. Es gibt sehr starke Gedichte, aber auch einige, die mich nicht ganz erreicht haben. Ich denke, es hängt stark von der eigenen Stimmung beim Lesen ab.
May 9, 2026
The used copy I bought has the most arbitrary lines underlined. Initially chose it for the content (death metaphors ofc), stayed for the surprise Portland settings! And by the way when I read this while getting my oil changed, it means that for that moment I am far superior to anyone else in the lobby scrolling aimlessly on their phone.
Did Not Finish
August 4, 2018Not my cup of tea. The rhythm is loose and repetitive. He writes in the style of Allen Ginsburg where the start of each sentence resets the chanted cadence. I don’t think these poems are about anything in particular, except feeling young, and experiencing adolescent angst.
February 14, 2025
4.6-
Engulfed in slow-building, emotionally vulnerable poems, Dickman masters the art of being human through his own sense of the world around him. Long or short, each poem drowns in revelations reached from a slow ascent.
Engulfed in slow-building, emotionally vulnerable poems, Dickman masters the art of being human through his own sense of the world around him. Long or short, each poem drowns in revelations reached from a slow ascent.
March 11, 2018
One of the most outstanding books of poetry I have ever read!
June 18, 2020
So fresh, honest and immediate - wow.
March 25, 2021
i think i’d like this less if i was a happier person but alas i am not. also, modern poetry i like!!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 70 reviews