What if the Invader Is Beautiful?

by Louise Mathias

What if the Invader is Beautiful explores the ineffable yet primal connections between outer and inner landscapes — the impact that the natural world has on the psychological terrain of our interior lives. Through compressed, musical, and often deeply mysterious language, the poems enact the extreme outer limits of emotional experience. Often set in equally extreme natural settings, the poems ride the knife edge between beauty and terror — exploring concepts of the sublime, the spiritual power of the elements, the redemptive beauty of flora and fauna, and the psychological freedom of wide-open spaces — and illuminate how deepening our connection to these elements is ultimately what will save us from our human afflictions of separation, isolation, and fear. 

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

Published September 15, 2024

About the author

Louise Mathias was born in 1975 in Bedford, England, and grew up in a small village in Suffolk, England, and later, Los Angeles. Her first book, Lark Apprentice, won the 2003 New Issues Poetry Prize and was published in 2004 by New Issues Press. A chapbook, Above All Else, the Trembling Resembles a Forest, was selected by Martha Ronk for the Burnside Review Chapbook contest, was published in 2010. Poems have appeared in journals such as Denver Quarterly, Triquarterly, Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Hunger Mountain, Epoch, Octopus, The Journal, Green Mountains Review, Slope, Verse Daily, and many others. Her second book, The Traps, is forthcoming from Four Way Books.

Reviews

[Hannah Bonner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning.

[birdbassador · Rating 5 out of 5]

normally my advice for poets for whom thanatos and eros are sort of egging each other on to a sort of climatic bloody rebirth is to take a shower and go for a walk in nature but obviously that didn't work in this particular case

[Amber Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dangerous and dripping with words you want to whisper in your lover’s ear.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mathias' poetry has always been sharp but in this book she's honed her poetry into a scalpel. Her work is dangerous and tender in turns - the poems take you to the edge and invite you to leap, and you do.