Matthew Reed Corey

One of the best modern/contemporary poets is Matthew Reed Corey. His work in Pinwheel vol. 5, Spring 2014 is incredible. I especially loved his "Later, in a White Room with the Burial Ships" and have only appreciated "Thallium, Cyanide, Hemlock" more and more with every re-read. I feel there's a type of Byronic 'space' in his work, an elongation and slow, sweet pace. Slower than Neruda, but with the same feel for mysterious [yet simple] symbolic language.

I just realized that we've featured him before, for his great piece "An Appetite in Winter Thrums" from Diagram, 12-5. It still holds up. I love his use of language, he never gives in to either cliche or too rarefied language. Both extremes are obnoxious, but he always skates by and writes something I didn't expect, something incredible.

I also loved his MatterMonthly July, 2014 piece "Written in Glass are Four Solutions to the Problem of Nothing". It's almost got a Beat sensibility and an ideologically Vonnegut tone, but surpasses both genres.

Here's an excerpt from "Thallium, Cyanide, Hemlock" to give you an example, be sure to set aside his work to read:

Orange-blossom honey, blue, not as cataracts, but blue even so, as orange-blossom honey,

blue: this misperception is not without you. 

[...]

Know our heart has five chambers: the castle of the air, the college, the page

of cups, your hedge maze with its lost message-boy, and my unborn son waking and waking.