Later she reflects on Hindu concepts of life after death when she says, “ I will die in a glow. She considers “a bad thing eating birds” and says, “an important part of me is the smell of birds.” Perhaps this is another reference to Max, who had his wounds and scars tattooed with birds, turning the ravages of Ewing’s sarcoma into something wild and beautiful. The author dreams of mouse ears filling her hands and eating them one by one, “at a party, sexily, with olives.”īird imagery also appears in Matthes’s work. Like him, Matthes addresses a rodent in “Rodney the Mouse.” She warns the patriarch of the mice living in her kitchen that she intends to kill them. As noted in his New York Times obituary, her friend Max once named and wrote about test mice injected with clones from his cancerous tumor. Town Crier received the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry.ĭedicated to the memory of fellow poet Max Ritvo, her poems contain imagery saturated with grief. Matthes wonders, as does the reader, if the animal is “mourning” or “at lunch” and questions the kind of mind that is “unable to recognize the difference.” The author sets the tone for her debut collection with this juxtaposition of beauty and horror, infused with a touch of ironic humor. Its little mouth trembling in the soft still fur From the first page of “The Basics” in Town Crier, Sarah Matthes captivates her audience with unexpected images:
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