In Accelerated Silence

March 1, 2020

Facing the loss of a loved one, many people rail against the heavens. But in her debut collection, Matson chooses to investigate them instead, like Eve with a pomegranate, "smashing a chest of rubies, / ...split[ting] the vermilion world in a violent need to know." Yet she also cries, "tow the borders/ of this universe far beyond// our grasp" because the very idea that tragedies have explanations is repugnant. Knowing that all her touchstones are gone, Matson struggles with grief ("I force my heft against an unseen fence/ every morning") and eventually is able to face the glorious "thumbprint" of the sun. Both anguished and unblinking, these poems deliver an understanding of being divided--tumor from body, self from beloved, and self from self after the fusion of passion burning hot as a megastar's core. VERDICT Accomplished poetry that will move those who have sorrowed--that is, everyone.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2020
Winner of the 2019 Jake Adam York Prize, Matson's collection is particularly well-made, which is to say individual poems often astonish, but the arrangement of and interconnections among them make the whole vastly more than the sum of its parts. And there are a lot of moving parts to reconcile and blend, including astrophysics, the biblical Eden, and death by cancer of a beloved. In language that ranges from the sweet and susurrant to the whine of a surgical saw, Matson ties the enormity of space to the specific and personal. So skillful is she, the reader doesn't feel the dizzying change in scale, only the speaker's wonderment, rage, or ache of memory. Centrifugal Force, for example, encapsulates the galaxy in the stretch of tossed pizza dough, a Dali clock / falling and rising as the speaker wonders how thin it can get before it breaks. Matson is a generous poet as well as a virtuosic one, and her invitations to bay at the moon alongside her should be accepted with enthusiasm.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)