Rapture & the Big Bam

$19.95

by Matt Donovan

With funky tempos and stretched, staggering lines, Matt Donovan’s new sequence interrogates the ways our daily lives teem with beauty and loss. He summons figures engrained in American culture to portray collisions of pleasure with tragedy, and to offer evidence for what creation can cost. As “each day lurches us toward … / things dying, things newborn,” the poet of Rapture & the Big Bam can be either a companion in mourning or a celebrant of unbeaten anticipation.

by Matt Donovan

With funky tempos and stretched, staggering lines, Matt Donovan’s new sequence interrogates the ways our daily lives teem with beauty and loss. He summons figures engrained in American culture to portray collisions of pleasure with tragedy, and to offer evidence for what creation can cost. As “each day lurches us toward … / things dying, things newborn,” the poet of Rapture & the Big Bam can be either a companion in mourning or a celebrant of unbeaten anticipation.

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About the Author

Matt Donovan is the author of a previous book of poems, Vellum (Mariner, 2007), and a collection of essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (Trinity University Press, 2016). He is the recipient of a Rome Prize in Literature, a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Pushcart Prize, an National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and the Larry Levis Reading Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University. He teaches at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

Advanced Praise

“The amazing achievement in Matt Donovan’s Rapture & the Big Bam is how well he balances the drive to speak intimately with the drive to shape a public (even civic) thought. His ease in following a leading image, trusting entirely that the image will speak far beyond anything he might have planned, makes for an authentic experience of surprise for a reader. His ear and his sense of line are controlled and idiosyncratic, glorious, raging, and fully in love with discovery.” — Lia Purpura

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-936797-94-3