New poetry collection from BC Professor of English Suzanne Matson
The 41 poems in Professor of English Suzanne Matson’s new poetry volume As Creatures—her third—move across many years of time and memory, charting travels and life transitions from becoming a mother to burying a mother.
Her poems chronicle seismic shifts of loss, as well as the beauties and gifts of everyday life, according to the volume’s description. The natural world serves as an ever-present backdrop, reminding us of our interdependencies and vulnerabilities “as creatures.”
Matson will launch and read from As Creatures on November 16 at 5:30 p.m. in Burns Library; copies will be available for sale and signing. The event, sponsored by BC Libraries in collaboration with the English Department, is free and open to the public.
“To launch this collection in the warm space of the Burns will feel like I am bringing it into the world among family,” said Matson. “I’m grateful for that opportunity.”
Among those praising As Creatures is Laura Kasischke, author of I Was Bonnie and Clyde: “These poems move with lucid precision through childhood, marriage, illness, and the long vigil at the end of it all. This is a collection of quiet astonishments, where what we cannot keep becomes, in language, what we most fully hold.”
Kelli Russell Agodon (Accidental Devotions) describes As Creatures as “deeply affecting” and lauds Matson for writing “straight into our humanness, our tenderness, and that terrifying space of loving something so much you can already feel its absence. It is a book about love, but also about our complicated journeys as humans and the deep, instinctual need to protect and care for our loved ones.”
Matson is also the author of four novels and a new nonfiction book, Winnowing, also released this month. Her work has garnered reviews in a range of newspapers, magazines, and literary journals. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Indiana Review, Washington Square, Harvard Review, New England Review, and elsewhere.
Cloudbank Books selected As Creatures for publication as winner of its Editor’s Choice award.
For more, see her author’s website, www.suzannematson.com.