The Traps

by Louise Mathias

Weaving together violence and beauty--"the beginning of war was also a blossom"--The Traps is a lyric collection that refuses a straight-forward narrative. Rather, each poem uses images to evoke an array of emotions: passion, terror, longing. These compact, yet intricate poems explore "traps" in the word's many connotations; whether we are in "the narrowest spaces" or "tied to the rafters," we are tempted, lured, and ambushed.

Genres: Poetry

48 pages, Paperback

First published April 9, 2013

About the author

Louise Mathias was born in 1975 in Bedford, England, and grew up in a small village in Suffolk, England, and later, Los Angeles. Her first book, Lark Apprentice, won the 2003 New Issues Poetry Prize and was published in 2004 by New Issues Press. A chapbook, Above All Else, the Trembling Resembles a Forest, was selected by Martha Ronk for the Burnside Review Chapbook contest, was published in 2010. Poems have appeared in journals such as Denver Quarterly, Triquarterly, Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Hunger Mountain, Epoch, Octopus, The Journal, Green Mountains Review, Slope, Verse Daily, and many others. Her second book, The Traps, is forthcoming from Four Way Books.

Reviews

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm glad I was alone in the house when I read this book because I must have sounded insane (lots of ah-ha's and oh my god's). Hot damn I love it when poems do exactly what they are supposed to do, which is to make me feel something that prose cannot access. There are so many combinations of words and images here that so perfectly evoke emotion the book feels like a study of Eliot's objective correlative. This book makes me want to write more careful poems.

"She dreams
she breast-feeds blood."

"The hyphenated world does pirouettes."

"Ever think
for every bird

we've bred this terrifying syntax?"

"How come gladioli

are always obscuring
the story?"

"Maybe you'll wear
what you've done
on the outside now, like so much

perilous jewelry."

"make a list

of atmospheres
you're willing

to believe in."

"Contraband, will you
turn to silk again?"

[Jordan Abbott · Rating 2 out of 5]

rip to whoever in my building paid $14.95 for this used

[Timothy Schirmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stumbled upon this book on Four Way’s website. It sounds silly, but I was impressed with the cover art and a few beautiful excerpts I found online, and then a couple of days later it was waiting in my mailbox! A note about cover art: I think a beautiful cover is huge indicator that that the author or publisher likely have good taste and understand that books have to seduce, otherwise, nobody will pick them up.

These poems are sinister, lovely and lean. Mathias cuts straight to the bone with them, but she doesn’t stop there; it’s as if she snaps the bones in half and drips the marrow all over the pages. The writing is so sparse and so personal, that at times I felt the poems excluded the reader a touch, but not in an unpleasing way.

Parts I loved: “skeleton coast”

“Which is to say, it’s a difficult place here, God. // Do you relate more to the dove or the snake? // Would you rather be harmless or stupid?”

“tastes slightly of antique silver, of April in Denver. Collared doves I watched in their cage.”

“I think of the year I spent not watching birds:”

“Undoing the want // takes a long, long time. Sometimes // you never.”

“Border towns of citrus and blood”

[Karin Gottshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Precise and wrenching; so very beautiful.

[Eli Tubbs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mathias' The Traps is a collection I can return to over and over and always take away something new from each poem. I wanted to write a poem tonight, The Traps lent me a hand.