Town Crier: Poems

Sarah Matthes

$15.95

Publication Date: April 13th, 2021

Publisher:

Persea

ISBN:

9780892555277

Pages:

Otto Bookstore

1 on hand, as of Apr 27 9:14pm

(Poetry )

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Description

Kabbalistic poems that recognize wit as a ritual of mourning, winner of the 2020 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize

The poems in Town Crier wryly express the pervasive nature of loss, how it suffuses all aspects of a life: memories, hopes, love, sex, lunch. The death of the author’s dear friend, the late poet Max Ritvo, becomes the cornerstone of the book, a foundational pain along which the poems are aligned. The poems grieve. They try to cope. They come up short. They try again, insisting as they do that language holds consequential, redemptive powers. Sarah Matthes is equal parts jester and conjurer, sensing the precious alchemy of laughter and lament, crying out to those who have left her and those who remain.

About the Author

Sarah Matthes is a poet from central New Jersey, which exists. Her debut collection of poetry won the 2020 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, and is forthcoming with Persea Books in Spring of 2021. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming with Pleiades, The Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, Yalobusha Review, poets.org, and elsewhere. Matthes has received support for her work from the Yiddish Book Center, and is the recipient of the 2019 Tor House Prize from the Robinson Jeffers Foundation and the 2019 Andrew Julius Gutow Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers and a BA in English & Creative Writing from Yale University. She serves as the managing editor of Bat City Review, and lives in Austin TX.