Somebody Else Sold the World
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A resonant new collection on love and persistence from the author of The Big Smoke, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize
The poems in Adrian Matejka's newest and fifth collection, Somebody Else Sold the World, meditate on the ways we exist in an uncontrollable world: in love and its aftermaths, in families that divide themselves, in protest-filled streets, in isolation as routines become obsolete because of lockdown orders and curfews. Somebody Else uses past and future touchstones like pop songs, love notes, and imaginary gossip to illuminate those moments of splendor that persist even in exhaustion. These poems show that there are many possibilities of brightness and hope, even in the middle of pandemics and revolutions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Matejka (Map to the Stars) delivers a cathartic ode to a tumultuous year of disease and unrest in his thoughtful latest. Vignettes of looming disease and nature's indifference to human suffering are rendered in their full complexity, "the possibly contaminated// air moves like the cognate/ of a person: it has walking// shoes as scuffed as a music/ conductor's. Its hands, needy// as a politician's. The whole/ neighborhood pops with// unknowing while optimistic/ birds chirp & skip & chirp." Matejka masterfully combines grief and hope, and one of his most salient insights is the pervasive end of ignorance and subsequent vulnerability in American life: "every/ thing sang its entropy. Almost/ everybody grew eventually. Not by/ revolution but realization: nostalgia made mnemonic." Though humor is not his priority, he utilizes it well when he chooses to, as in "Coincidence/Accident": "& now everybody is some kind/ of delicious fetish. A whole/ chorus of proclivities, full-throttled/ in the washbowl of next-door/ freaky." With an epigraph that draws from David Bowie ("You're face to face/ with the man who sold the world"), music serves as an impetus for these accomplished pages that subtly convey the whiplash of everyday life.
