Bøker av Matt Donovan

Traveling the nation, Matt Donovan examines the paradox of a country plagued by gun violence yet consumed with protecting the right to bear arms.Matt Donovan’s The Dug-Up Gun Museum confronts our country’s obsession with guns to explore America’s deep-seated political divisions and issues linked to violence, race, power, and privilege. Taking its title from an actual museum located in Wyoming, this collection of poems interrogates our country’s history of gun violence, asking questions about our fetishization of weapons, how mass shootings and the killing of unarmed civilians by police have become normalized, and the multitudinous ways in which firearms are ingrained in our country’s culture. Much like the poet himself, Donovan’s poems are dynamic and constantly in motion as he explores the ways in which capitalism and its relentless stream of content have led to a collective desensitization in the face of violence. In turns harrowing, elegiac, and ironic, set in locations ranging from Cody to Chicago, from Las Vegas to Sandy Hook, The Dug-Up Gun Museum probes America’s failures, bizarre infatuations, and innumerable tragedies linked to guns.

Vellum, the exquisite debut collection from Matt Donovan, meditates on beauty, art, and the violence that is sometimes inherent in both.Here, he juxtaposes religious iconography with stories from history, biography, and personal narrative. In the poignant “Saint Catherine in an O,” a knife bears unlikely duality—an object stirring with danger and grace.“A man plays slide guitar / with his pocketknife, accompanying the words of his songs—/ one about light, the Lord moving on water . . . / how blood, he knows, will make him whole.” In other poems, he reflects upon master artists, who captured similar themes in their art though in different mediums. Brimming with poems that are quietly powerful, Vellum marks the arrival of a commanding new voice.

With funky tempos and stretched, staggering lines, Matt Donovan's poetic sequence interrogates the ways our daily lives teem with beauty and loss, featuring figures engrained in our culture to portray collisions of pleasure with tragedy, including Scott Joplin, John Singer Sargent, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Babe Ruth, and John Coltrane.