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Desecrations
A luminous new collection of poems about entering middle age, living a life of books, and trying to know what it means to be or not be from or of a place.
If pattern is information, and verse the mind's conversation with Time, Matt Rader's Desecrations animates a theatre of silence we recognize as mystery. Building on an already astonishing body of work, in lines so fluid and uncannily resonant they feel cousined to the dream world, Rader insists that intimate moments bear the cargo of both past and future, antiquity and grim projection, ancestry and unborn selves, resulting in poems of kaleidoscopic beauty and strangeness. These singular, musical evocations eschew argument in favour of a welcoming, arms-wide abandon, and an ethics of porousness and connection. By some alchemy of voice, detail, collision, and disobedience to chronology, Desecrations reveals the imagination as a worthy location of real experience. These poems are a new way to orbit around a locus of damage, a new fabric of signs and singing that we can't help but realize we'd been yearning for all along.
If pattern is information, and verse the mind's conversation with Time, Matt Rader's Desecrations animates a theatre of silence we recognize as mystery. Building on an already astonishing body of work, in lines so fluid and uncannily resonant they feel cousined to the dream world, Rader insists that intimate moments bear the cargo of both past and future, antiquity and grim projection, ancestry and unborn selves, resulting in poems of kaleidoscopic beauty and strangeness. These singular, musical evocations eschew argument in favour of a welcoming, arms-wide abandon, and an ethics of porousness and connection. By some alchemy of voice, detail, collision, and disobedience to chronology, Desecrations reveals the imagination as a worthy location of real experience. These poems are a new way to orbit around a locus of damage, a new fabric of signs and singing that we can't help but realize we'd been yearning for all along.
96 pages, Paperback
Published April 5, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 26, 2019
Took me so long to get through this because I kept rereading poems. Apparently Rader does not understand that we live in a disposable age, and insists on producing work which rewards repeated visits. Very annoying. All the poems are full of words. Rader enjoys words, okay I get it, but does he really have to try and sweep up innocent readers (like me) into his obsessive enjoyment? It all borders on the perverse. All in all, Rader has manage to desecrate my free time, enrich my insights, and destroy my precious innocence. Shame on him.
December 27, 2017
[3.5]
Beautiful but a little detached at points. I enjoyed Rader's imagery and loved the longer poems.
Beautiful but a little detached at points. I enjoyed Rader's imagery and loved the longer poems.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews