Description
He drives his readers through the beautiful and variable landscapes of his home state, introduces them to the native flora, fauna, and the personal and historical stories the land holds. Their realistic imagery and gentle observation of the natural world invite readers to slow down– watch out the window. Mason resists from idealizing the world, instead accepts it at face value and meets hope where it naturally grows. Through times of pandemic and isolation Mason exposes the ins and outs of isolation, and the joy in re-building community. They emphasize the importance of poetry and the stage it allows not just him but anyone brave enough to write. All together this collection reads like one long drive, full of changes in conversation, circles back to childhood, and lapse in dialogue to enjoy the view. Mason lets us in the door, and gives us a tour of home.
Praise for Matt Mason
Matt Mason’s latest collection, Roads, carries us into the wide landscape of Nebraska and into the vast territory of the human heart. In these pages, you’ll range the tall grass prairies and traverse the Missouri and the Platte, where trains roll through the celestial and the verses talk with the dead as “I will howl/ this moon to the ground.” There are heroes and matadors and politicians and pandemics and troubled histories throughout—and all of it given Mason’s deep compassion, which is paired with a clear-eyed accounting of the self and the world we inhabit, the ways we inhabit it, the ways it inhabits us. Roads is a celebration of a place and of a people, and these poems explore “what gods and artists chisel from the Earth.” If you’re new to Matt Mason’s work, prepare to meet a new friend—and to be taken on a journey deeper into the heartland of the self.
— Brian Turner, author of The Wild Delight of Wild Things
Matt Mason’s poems in Roads evokes my home state and the Plains as exquisitely as Alexander Payne’s Nebraska and Willa Cather’s My Antonia. They made me think of riding in the back of the Chevy wagon from Omaha out to the Black Hills every summer, and of my mom reading her beloved John G. Neihardt and Wallace Stegner in campgrounds and motels along the way. Some of Mason’s poetry is funny, bless him, and some is political, and one –– “There are men / running for governor of my state / who swear / they will save us /from werewolves / and leprechauns” –– is wonderfully both. I’ve just added another name to my small handful of favorite living poets.
— Kurt Andersen, author of The Breakup
If Matt Mason’s Roads are taking us anywhere, they are leading us in the direction of hope knowing there’s no map, no formula. The poems in this collection meander and travel, but with fierce paradoxical purpose. Mason invites us to honor hope’s most contradictory ask: to believe even while we see clearly the pain of our current moment, to be “awake staring down mystery,” to stand in the quiet stillness of a Nebraska sky and “howl this moon to the ground.”
— Stacey Waite, author of A Real Man Would Have a Gun
About Matt Mason
Matt Mason served as the Nebraska State Poet from 2019-2024 and has run poetry workshops in Botswana, Romania, Nepal, and Belarus for the U.S. State Department. His poetry has appeared in The New York Times and Matt has received a… MORE