Focused deeply on a language to navigate the outward space of the body, the heart of these poems beats between want and its relief, no matter how briefly it’s obtained. Gagnon’s poems forage, find their bearings, then sing out of the body’s reorientation in a territory it is continuously desiring to understand, they gallop “as a flame / does, against / the turbulence / of convictions.”
Pam Rehm
These poems are fluent in the language of pool, sky, bath, afternoon, body, earth—the way things pass into and out of the mind, the way a bird’s song can become: “the slow ancient call of the bird/ in the distant flicker.” Gagnon has much to say about how and where we find one another, how and what we see in the field of the world’s luminous circumstance. For the sheer dexterity of phrase, the pleasure of perceiving, and the music of quiet crescendo, this is a book to be savored and read and savored again.
Mark McMorris
In ravishing language that blends ecstasis with visionary wonder, Matt Gagnon’s poems plumb the phenomenological terrain of our creaturely experience. “This terra parches wonderment / and leaves us still and ghosted,” Gagnon writes, and the work gathered here speaks to the serious introit of desire and ghostliness that limn our anthropomorphic selves. Forwarding Louis Zukofsky’s “upper limit music” and the prescient romanticism of Robert Duncan’s lyric address, Gagnon masterfully weaves together the scales and signs of our worldly attention, providing necessary evidence of the body’s “molecular advance twilit, sheened, abraded.” Querulous, ruminative, distilling narratives from the molecular tide of diurnal experience, Gagnon’s haunting Song of the Systole asks “Is it possible to love more than one world, to see clear across to the other side?” This beautiful book, “hounded by rituals of loss,” inscribes its pain-worn and joyous journey in an effort to make that crossing visible and audible to each of us.
Andrew Mossin
