The Spoils

by Ted Mathys

“Reading Mathys, one remembers that poetry isn't a dalliance, but a way of sorting through life-or-death situations.”— Los Angeles Times Beginning with the delivery of a diplomatic soccer ball to Henry Kissinger and culminating in a transformative road trip through the Deep South, these three poem cycles navigate the contradictions of modern life and morality. From exploring the deification of athletes and statesmen to considering the instincts that lead a sea turtle to nest in a Wal-Mart parking lot, Mathys revels in exploding the lyrical terrain of paradox. An Ohio native, Ted Mathys is the author of Forge . He has lived and worked in Berlin, Hong Kong, and New York and currently studies law and diplomacy at Tufts University.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2009

About the author

Ted Mathys is the author of four books of poetry including, most recently, Gold Cure (Coffee House Press, 2020). His honors include fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Poetry Society of America, and Saint Louis Regional Arts Commission. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and lives in St. Louis, where he teaches at Saint Louis University and curates the 100 Boots Poetry Series at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

Reviews

[Lightsey]

This is serious stuff--formal, nearly classical in language (and oh that vocabulary); morally serious; project-driven, not one-off; at times grandly inscrutable, with a close to objective "I," almost a relic of an "I". I'm impressed at the same time that I'm not sure the moral/political drive of the poems really stuck with me. . . but then I'm not sure that's Mathys's fault. My favorite section is Mathys's Southern dive--he really gets a feel that I recognize, but without cliche--an individual but authentic South.