Sad Little Breathing Machine

by Matthea Harvey

Harvey, whose debut collection was praised by the New Yorker
as "intensely visual, mournfully comic and syntactically
inventive," offers her second stunning collection

Units are the engines
I understand best.

One betrayal, two.
Merrily, merrily, merrily.
-from "Introduction to the World"

In Sad Little Breathing Machine, Matthea Harvey explores the strange and intricate mechanics of human systems-of the body, of thought, of language itself. These are the engines, like poetry, that propel both our comprehension and misunderstanding. "If you're lucky," Harvey writes, "after a number of / revolutions, you'll / feel something catch."

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2004

About the author

Matthea Harvey is the author of three books of poetry--Modern Life, Sad Little Breathing Machine and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form, and one children's book, The Little General and the Giant Snowflake. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence and lives in Brooklyn.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

overall i have to say blarg to this one. i liked her other 2 books well enough, and there are many things about this one i like, but overall i fear that i am not poetry-clever enough to appreciate what i assume must be calculated stylistic choices. to me it reads like disjointed and soulless wordmesses that leave me completely cold.

come to my blog!

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harvey is not an easy poet--she leaps faster than I can--but she is my kind of eccentric and I am fascinated by her.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny touching and endearingly odd.

[Glenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Matthea’s Harvey’s poetry is like going to a foreign country, and not knowing the language. Perhaps you stay a while. Eventually, words and phrases which pulled tantalizingly away from you at first, their sounds striking and bold, evocative and possessing an almost subconscious power, begin to coalesce.

Then, still with the breathtaking mystery of staying in a strange place, you may find you are able to gain some small entry into its true essence, while still maintaining the sense of wonder at something truly different.

Matthea Harvey’s poetry rewards the effort, involvement and attention of the reader. Her language is fresh and unusual in the best sense--without contrivance or petty literary gamesmanship. She has the ability to stimulate the reader’s mind, and still be able to suddenly swoop in, and hit directly in the gut by creating shocking, unpredictable connections. The work is alive and moving on the page, vibrant, ever-opening, capable of astonishing power and emotional force, while never being melodramatic--the exactitude of Matthea’s language will not allow it--and of course, the work remains stunningly original.

[Heather Gibbons · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was definitely interesting to read this directly after reading her first collection and see how these poems engage and grapple with form in drastically different ways. This is a restless, wildly inventive voice and I found much to admire here. However, nothing really *moved* me-- lots of wonder and play and cleverness (wince, there I've said it), but on the whole, I missed the emotional torpor and crazy momentum of Bathtub. Still, to witness this kind of change/development in form from one collection to the next is pretty cool.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Matthea Harvey plays with words and poetic syntax in a fashion that often surprises and delights. For me, there is always a layer of irony or sarcasm that seems like a distancing filter, leaving the balance between the emotional and the cerebral strongly, very strongly, in favor of the latter. Which is only a problem for those of us who prefer the former. From "Meat Ravioli VS. Spaghetti Bolognese":
"Each film mentioned at the dinner party/ was a sinkhole we skirted so as not to fall/
into story. It's like Pete & Betty always said:/ self as discrete package or self in the world."

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I made the note of "best poem" on several poems. Matthea Harvey has a wonderful sense of humor, sense of life, sense of ...well, just sense. Her mind must shimmer like the fireflies about which she writes. Read "Once Upon a Time: A Genre Fable."

[Tess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harvey is one of those poets one can return to again and again for inspiration. A good mind at work.

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of the reviews printed on the back of the book says: "Each neat poem is a Pandora's box full of wonderful troubles." If that is an accurate statement, then honestly, I did not have a key to unlock any of the boxes. Every poem I read was completely over my head. Borrowing a line from a movie, I felt like a complete cotton-headed ninny muggins. So, although this may have been an amazing collection of little gems written by a gifted poet, they didn't work for me.

I have to admit that I bought this collection because I am trying to expand my appreciation and understanding of poetry. The title caught my eye when I first saw it in a little bookstore on the main street in Amherst, MA. For me, the best thing about this book is the memory I will retain of buying it while I was touring colleges with my daughter last summer.

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Jealous Narcissus bit the river. / The sky was a memoir of blue.” Sad Little Breathing Machine, the 2004 Matthea Harvey poetry collection, is incisive + puzzling, dystopian, whirlwind. Through new and imaginative styles of poetry, Harvey ponders modern questions long before they were conceived so deeply in the collective consciousness; ‘Ideas Go Only So Far’ and ‘Introduction of Narrative’ are two examples of Harvey deploying meta-poetry to magnificent ends. “The sun was almost eye-level.”

[Courtney S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Her turns of phrases and use of structure are so whimsical. My favorite passage was:
“I have been given my sentence
& it is not a long one
though it does include the word
quintessential which pleases me.”

Baked Alaska was a witty and whimsical detour the rest of the book and really stood out as a centerpiece.

Super enjoyable read.

[Bailey :) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Matthea Harvey is such a strange poet, each of her books are so exciting because of this. I love the wordplay that happens here, the leaps in logic, the dedication to form and refrain. Great collection.

[M · Rating 2 out of 5]

the downstairs chandelier
stayed still, its prisms prim.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. I'd never read poetry like this before, and as I made my way through Sad Little Breathing Machine I was constantly amazed by Harvey's creativity with form, grammar, and language. Really fun to read!

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

God bless matthea harvey. She cracks me up, delights me, confuses me, makes me admire her turn of phrases and surprises of similes. I love her in a way I don’t love others. And that delights me.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic poetry, incredibly engaging. I reread it every few years after picking it up for a college poetry course.

[Hannah Antalek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sad Little Breathing Machine is without a doubt one of my favorite titles for a book of poetry. When reading poetry I usually don’t give much thought to the title in relation to overall content of the book because a lot of the time I feel these titles are arbitrary and chosen only after a particularly good poem included in the book. While Sad Little Breathing Machine is also the title of one of the poems in the book I never felt that it was arbitrary, this title related to the book’s content as a whole.
All the poems functioned as part of a machine- each influencing the other and bringing out each other’s strengths, working together so well it was as if they were part of a single breathing body.
Matthea Harvery’s poems are surrealistic in nature offering many absurd propositions and illogical scenarios that in the context of Harvey’s world seem not only plausible, but reasonable. In Save the Originals Harvey introduces a copy machine by which people can duplicate themselves: “I don’t fiddle with the dials, I make a copy. I like him immediately. He looks like me but with darker circles under his my-eyes, a more pronounced scar on his my-cheek. When I look up, I see that Sylvia has made herself three copies at 10%, 35% & 75%. A Sylvia crescendo.” Another notable poem is The Crowds Cheered as Gloom Galloped Away where everyone’s problems and sorrows are horses that gallop beside them and then eventually run away. In Ideas Go Only So Far the narrator talks about making a baby “in the shape of a hatbox or a cake.” and says, “When you make up a good baby, other people will want one too. Who’s to say that I’m the only one who deserves a dear little machine-washable ever-so-presentable baby. Not me. So I made a batch. But they weren’t exactly like her-they were smaller & without any inborn dread. Sometimes I see one rolling past my window at sunset-quite unlike my baby, who like any good idea eventually ended up dead.” Another notable poem is Baked Alaska, A Theory Of in which a castle takes on the form of a Baked Alaska, hot on the outside: “The moat simmers at 210 degrees” but cold on the inside: “Amongst the frozen slabs of beef, they sit in a circle on blocks of ice & watch the red fade from their lips & fingers, the frost on the floor creep up the heels of their shoes. Finally when the skin is numb, the heat starts retreating into their hearts & they can feel it-love, love, love.”
In addition to the title acting as a unifier for all the poems in Sad Little Breathing Machine it acts to describe all the characters woven into Harvey’s poems all of which become sad little breathing machines in their own right.

[Moose · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the majority of Sad Little Breathing Machine after having a class period in which the collection of poems was discussed; whether or not I would have grasped (or did come close to grasping even after a class period) the essence of the text, I certainly found the prose and poems of the book to be compelling.
Without knowing basic background information on the Hero’s journey and Harvey’s representation of that journey without all of the classic stereotypes (e.g. male hero) associated with it, I suspect SLBM would have meant next to nothing to me upon first read, and therefore I would have thrown it out as crap. Having this context, however, allowed me to approach the book knowing the basic premise and theme of the text, which allowed me to put some meaning to the text. Not much. But some.
I probably enjoyed ‘Introduction to the World’ most – the use of the phrase ‘like thoughts, geniuses rush through’ evokes, for me, the idea that geniuses aren’t people, but thoughts that come to people – anybody can have a genius. It might take a lot of tries, but your genius will eventually catch – you will find your passion and follow it.
A close second was Baked Alaska – I liked this mostly because I like Alaska, and the idea of ‘the flesh is hot but the heart is cold’ was kind of cool in relation to the state. Also, I thoroughly enjoy the fact that the king finds nothing ‘because he is a literal man.’
In ‘Toe the line with me,’ the author introduces the concept of the ‘other’ – it describes it as a duck and a sunfish going for the same piece of bread. In this scenario, their mouths are bound to touch. The other in this poem also appears – in the form of ‘you’ and also an ex. As the sequence of poems goes on, the author – the self – grows. Soon, it looks at itself in a spoon and realized it is just a head, it never learned to make ringlets. The self also feels the need to raise a Baby. At the end of the book, however, Baby is in the house in the incubator, and the sleeping bag contains the body but not the head. Perhaps the self has regressed to nothingness.
Finally, the self also is seen to evolve through poems that begin with the instructions to call it something different – “What You Will,” “Content,” and “responsible.” On top of this, there is something going on with the word Engine: followed by symbols that change throughout the text; in one case the symbols also contain the words “You are Who.” I propose that this technique was meant to evoke emotions of the inner workings of a machine like a computer to the reader - many of the symbols have no meaning to humans but have a lot of code and meaning to the machine.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wholeheartedly love this book. It is a collection that once you have read the last poem – you start over again. One of my very favorite poems in this book:

The Crowds Cheered as Gloom Galloped Away
BY MATTHEA HARVEY
Everyone was happier. But where did the sadness go? People wanted to know. They didn’t want it collecting in their elbows or knees then popping up later. The girl who thought of the ponies made a lot of money. Now a month’s supply of pills came in a hard blue case with a handle. You opened it & found the usual vial plus six tiny ponies of assorted shapes & sizes, softly breathing in the Styrofoam. Often they had to be pried out & would wobble a little when first put on the ground. In the beginning the children tried to play with them, but the sharp hooves nicked their fingers & the ponies refused to jump over pencil hurdles. The children stopped feeding them sugarwater & the ponies were left to break their legs on the gardens’ gravel paths or drown in the gutters. On the first day of the month, rats gathered on doorsteps & spat out only the bitter manes. Many a pony’s last sight was a bounding squirrel with its tail hovering over its head like a halo. Behind the movie theatre the hardier ponies gathered in packs amongst the cigarette butts, getting their hooves stuck in wads of gum. They lined the hills at funerals, huddled under folding chairs at weddings. It became a matter of pride if one of your ponies proved unusually sturdy. People would smile & say, “This would have been an awful month for me,” pointing to the glossy palomino trotting energetically around their ankles. Eventually, the ponies were no longer needed. People had learned to imagine their sadness trotting away. & when they wanted something more tangible, they could always go to the racetrack & study the larger horses’ faces. Gloom, #341, with those big black eyes, was almost sure to win.

~~~
The collection paces with a selection of imaginative, yet explicit prose poems, introduction poems and engine poems. Obviously, it is brilliant.

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sad Little Breathing Machine has multiple parts, yet there is a sense of a cohesive structure as each section starts out with an introduction poem. The poems vary in style and each section has roughly the same proportions of style variety. Like her previous book, the titles help somewhat in shaping the structure, although there are points it seems she intentionally avoids following the title she’s given the poem. There are still many lines that contain insightful observations. For example, the poem “Toe the Line with Me” has the line “Consider this: if sunfish & ducks compete for the same bit of bread, at any moment their mouths might meet”, and the poem “Life-size is what we are (A new history of photography)” (5) has the line ,“Which means the fish that live/ in a plastic bag think the edges of the world pucker” Both of which are things that people normally do not think of but could very well be true.
The question of what’s true seems to come up more in this book. These poems deal with complicated issues in life and language. Many of the fantastical stories stem from the question ‘what if things were this way?’ which ultimately brings up the question “why are things the way they are now?” In “The Crowds Cheered as Gloom Galloped Away” the premise is what would happen if sadness and pain could be transferred to miniature ponies that “came in a hard blue case with a handle” much like pills, until people could “[learn] to imagine their sadness trotting away” (18). Then in “Ideas Go Only So Far” there’s the disturbing idea of what could happen if one was able to make a machine-washable perfect baby.
All-in-all this book is edgier than her last book. With lines like “I pixilated you, ate sugar in the form of quince” (8) in her poem “No More Frisson Please” one gets the sense that this is a more serious matter indeed.

[Rr Sigel]

I really enjoyed reading Matthea Harvey’s collection “Sad Little Breathing Machine,” which seemed to successfully integrate ideas about modern mechanization with commentary on the intricacies of language and its limitations. Unlike the images in “Aim Straight at the Fountain...”, all of the images in “Sad Little Breathing Machine” seem important, not just vehicles to create an image collage. What was so impressive to me was how Harvey was able to bring both language play and real-world commentary to the forefront at the same time, without one dominating the other. Through poems like the complementary INTRODUCTION TO ADDICTION (39) and INTRODUCTION TO A DICTION (40), Harvey puts modernity and language play right next to each other in parallel, allowing them to function independently, while linking them in title and style. Harvey’s poetry is also just a lot of fun to read, as she gives the reader some fantastic situations to consider, very few of which are simply auxiliary: I got the idea that every single idea, no matter how whimsical, was placed and presented purposefully, not simply chosen for its strangeness or the way the words sound. Harvey seems committed to her themes. A few image/situation highlights:

SENTENCED: THE SUBJECT OBJECTS TO ITS LONG DISTANCE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE OBJECT (55) “Were you here, I’d say, “what if clouds// looked like planes before planes//looked like clouds...”

“which means the fish that live/ in a plastic bag think the edges//of the world pucker. It’s one thing to/ make an image. It’s two things to find one.” (5)

“consider this: if sunfish/ & ducks compete for the same bit//of bread, at any moment their lips/ might meet.” (9)

SAVE THE ORIGINALS (11) “For the entrance exam we have to match TV static to a daisy field.”

[Jcasper · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the first read, Matthea Harvey’s Sad Little Breathing Machine is incredibly dense and conceptual, an extremely difficult read that is often quite hard to understand. Yet, as I spent more time with the poems, they slowly began to open up. Often delightfully clever, the generally terse poems combined to form what felt like an exercise in social thought. Poems like ‘First Person Fabulous’ intelligently examined the social implications of the interplay between First Person and Third Person voices, a theme that resurfaces throughout the book. In fact, I found the prose poems in general to be the most successful, partly because their ideas seemed more fleshed out, understandable and relatable. But Harvey departs from the dominant prose and couplet poetry with witty poems in a variety of forms. One of my personal favorites, ‘Definition of Weather’ reminded me of a poem I had written a few weeks ago, although I must admit Harvey’s is far more successful. But as interesting as these poems are, what made them so successful is their imagination. From the Baked Alaska Castle to Splash and his copy Splish, the remarkable inventiveness and creativity that Harvey includes makes the book a delight to read. What’s better, most of the inventiveness occupies the space of a commentary on social interaction. My only concern with the book is that it requires too many reading to really grasp what the author is trying to convey. The couplet poetry in particular often left me wanting, mostly because the sharp, terse language made interpretations somewhat difficult. Compared to Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize, this couldn’t have been more different, which is strange because for some reason I expected them to be quite similar.

[Mikey]

Matthea Harvey arranges her poetry into six sections that each start with an introduction going from "Introduction to the World" to "Introduction to the End". The book moves through a path of life from birth to death. The book grasps a readers attention because there are so many ways to read it and so many paths that it follows. Perhaps one interpretation of the book is a movement through the discovery of self, but the book has other recurring themes that have a beginning and end and journey through the book. The themes that I found included the rise and fall of civilization, the loss of humanity and rise of machines, the start and end of an idea, the process of writing. I liked how the poems form a cohesive unit, but also feel that many of them can stand alone which adds to their intrigue. And while the book has some sort of structure, not everything is apparent. What do all the Engine symbols mean? What about the title? The title gives the collection a troubling cover. Does everything in the end amount to a "sad little breathing machine". Is that what each person is? When I think machine I think programmed and mechanical and without much choice. If nothing else Harvey's poetry can be enjoyed for the thought provoking imagery. "that's my love there in the swivel chair. I'm the sugar bowl on wheels" or "the trains twitched in their tracks". "holding veined circles against the rain" and "if oil spill, if imperfect pancake, then tupperware, terrarium, gumball machine". And even if we have a mind to change the weather, the weather can't be changed, and whirls around in unpredictable circles. And so we have the clash of the predictable and perhaps predestined (the sad little breathing machine... etc.) and the unpredictable and chaotic (the weather... the engine?... etc.)

[Maureen · Rating 5 out of 5]

That Matthea Harvey is among my favorite living poets. Witty, inventive, endlessly imaginative.


A sample:




BAKED ALASKA, A THEORY OF

The moat simmers at 210°. From his tower the king watches, pleased, as a swallow tries to land on the water, squawks & flies off. He believes in setting a good example. O the flesh is hot but the heart is cold, you’ll be alone when you are old, his favorite country song—on repeat—is being piped through the palace. Downstairs in the dining room, the princesses gaze out the window at a flock of pigeons turning pink then black as they fly in & out of the sunset. The princesses put down their spoons & sigh. Baked Alaska for dessert again. The flambée lights up their downcast faces. In the fireplace, dry ice sizzles didactically. When dinner is over, they return to their wing of the palace, The Right Ventricle. On a good day, they can play Hearts for a few hours before they hear the king’s dactyllic footsteps (dámn the queen, dámn the queen) coming down the aorta & have to hide the cards. They aren’t allowed to adore him, so they don’t, just allow his inspections—checking their eyes for stars, their journals for heated confessions. Because he is a literal man, he never finds anything. But that night, when he’s gone, the princesses tiptoe down to the palace freezer. Sticking their fingers in sockets is no longer enough. Amongst the frozen slabs of beef, they sit in a circle on blocks of ice & watch the red fade from their lips and fingers, the frost on the floor creep up the heels of their shoes. Finally when the skin is numb, the heat starts retreating into their hearts & they can feel it—love, love, love.

[Philip Gordon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here we have another instance of a book that is so showered in critical acclaim that I feel any dissent on my part will be seen as disingenuous. I greatly wanted to like Matthea Harvey's poems--even before studying one of her works in class, the titles of her collections and attitude of her overall voice seemed to speak to me, and this was the first book of hers I sat down and read in full.

Taking "You're Miss Reading" as my first window into her poetry, I was hoping not all of her poems would prove as rife with hidden messages and incomprehensibility as that one is--sadly, I was disappointed. I am at odds with the type of poetry in this book--it is at once obtuse, obscured, and deliberately difficult, while at the same time light-hearted, charming, and playful. I wanted to like many of the poems more than I did--even after reading them through three or four times, with engines sometimes in hand, I couldn't often make more than a headscratch out of their contents--but many turns of phrase were humourous and entertaining, the titles were always a pleasure, and the devices of language and organization were all fun.

I wavered to a lower score, but at the end of the day, I'd recommend this collection, if only because what Matthea Harvey does is so unique, that I'm not sure I've seen it anywhere else, even reading this in parallel to Canada's own Ken Babstock, who is every bit as difficult, but somehow not quite as rewarding despite being exactly as inscrutable. I should like to read more of Matthea Harvey's work and hopefully find something a little bit easier to crack into.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book of poems was constantly misleading… starting from the title. I expected I nice collection of melancholic poems about the human condition. Instead, the mood felt light hearted (although sometimes the playfulness would abruptly turn into something much darker); almost childlike at times.
There seemed to be three types of poems:
The prose poems were a little easier to digest. They even bordered on short stories.
There were also poems divided into couplets. I found these the most difficult. The clearly defined structure and writing style hinted at a linear thought process, but often, from sentence to sentence, the train of thought would be difficult to follow. I loved “Abandoned Conversation With The Senses”, but I’m still not quite sure how each thought relates to one another. Sometimes, sentences would take strange turns too. (i.e. “Where the squint & the kiss are common, there are no rebels lurking between the 15th and 16th parallel.” Where did the second part to that sentence come from?!).
The final set of poems were the ones beginning with “Introduction to…” in the titles. They utilized unconventional layouts and often I found it difficult to relate them back to their title. The thoughts felt more scattered. Punchy. Almost like precise stabs (contrary to the flowing sweeps of the prose poems).
Only a few poems stood out after my first reading of Sad Little Breathing Machine, but it left me feeling like I had missed out on a lot great stuff.

[Brent Legault · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, it all began on page four, and it began with this:

Unfasten the crows & the clouds come crashing down.

And from there it continued, good and favorite lines, multiplying like fetal tissue, like tadpoles in a pond or puddle, this Sad Little Breathing Machine, until it grew into a baby in the shape of a hatbox or a cake.

It has a taste for sugar and scallops and fallen soufles. And lemons, too, but not for lemonade. It has also a charming wit and a witty charm. It likes play, especially wordplay, and in particular alliterations both majiscule and miniscule. It's aware of the rules of grammar and syntax but it isn't married to them. It's a free spirit that makes its own rules and by these rules it rules itself sternly but justly. It has a knack for fable but none, thank god, for morals. It's teasy and twee but also honest and articulate. It is, I believe, the perfect midnight mate.

When you make up a good baby, other people will want one too. Who's to say that I'm the only one who deserves a dear little machine-washable ever-so-presentable baby. Not me. So I made a batch. But they weren't exactly like her -- they were smaller & without any inborn dread. Sometimes I see one rolling past my window at sunset -- quite unlike my baby, who like any good idea, eventaully ended up dead.

[Amanda Lucek]

I don't know where my week went, so all I have right now are some preliminary notes on the book. Since we're going to be discussing it for 2 weeks hopefully it will be acceptable if I change this into an actual review before then. I may even be able to get this fleshed out a bit more tomorrow afternoon before class, we'll see.



Whimsy w/ language play:
"To Zanzibar by motorcar" (6)
"the ether wasn't working either" (8)


great phrases – unexpected and yet perfectly fitting:
"zebras fingerprint the plains" (6)


The poems in the book (save for 2 – we'll get to those later) come in 3 forms. The most dominant is the Doublet form, made up entirely of paired lines with the possible exception of the last line, which may stand on its own. The next form is Prose form, where the text has no intentional line breaks at all. And the third is what I would call a "Dialogic" form – one in which lines appear in 2 "columns" (which may at times overlap). "Dialogic" may be a misleading term however, for the two columns need not be representative of 2 speakers who answer one another back and forth – the text could just as easily be 2 streams of thought running through the same mind or something else altogether.

2 poems that don't fit: 1 written in triplets, 1 written as dictionary defs.

[Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sad Little Breathing Machine...what can I say that's different about this work of poetry than the last few that I have read? Not really anything. Yes, the language was beautiful, and yes, the form was cool. But did I "get it?" No not at all, at least not until someone told me what to look for. It is quite clever, actually. Matthea Harvey uses this book to retell a story that follows the classic archetype of a hero, but this time does it from a female perspective and in a less obvious way. She tells this of this female archetype through a series of confusing and nicely constructed poems, but to me, the story was told through the titles of the poems. While the content of each individual work gives the reader clues about what is going on, the titles tell the tale in short. She reverses the perspective of a well known character, and perhaps that is why it was so confusing to me at first. While I should recognize the character, the female hero is not something that I am accustomed to.

In the end, I guess it was just a little over my head at first glance. But when I go back and read it again, I'm sure that I will be able to get more meaning from it.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surreal literature, especially surreal poetry, can be very tricky. You want to be surreal enough to push the envelope, but you still want it to be relatable on some level, so that you don't lose your reader. Not everyone can do it, in fact, very few people can pull it off.

Matthea Harvey, thankfully, is one of those people. It helps that mixed in with shorter experimental poems there are prose poems that offer surreal narratives on the art of writing. These are the true gems of this collection, where Narrative gives birth to Memoir after growing apart from high school friends Poetry and Art. Where First Person longs to escape from Third Person's shadow. These proems artfully present the angst and oddity of the writer's profession, while also letting the reader who may not be w writer in on the joke.

I prefer this collection to Harvey's earlier effort, Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form. The poet has matured and really grown into her form. I look forward to reading more from her.