Small Gods

by Matthew Minicucci

In exquisitely mysterious prose poems ranging from epistles to proofs, Small Gods meditates on deeply human questions of faith, creating an inward, almost timeless landscape that widens outward from the familial and the existential and that opens up to the stars.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2017

About the author

Matthew Minicucci is the award-winning author of three collections of poetry. His fourth, Dual will be published by Acre Books on October 15th, 2023. His poems and essays have appeared in journals including APR, The Believer, the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, POETRY, and The Southern Review. His work has garnered numerous accolades including the Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award and the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, along with fellowships from organizations including the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Dartmouth College, the National Parks Service, and the James Merrill House, among others. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Blount Scholars Program at the University of Alabama.

Reviews

[Callista · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a book! A study in how abstract can help us understand the concretely human, in how forces operate, oppose, and connect, how scientific, mathematical, and technical language can help us understand ourselves and our loves and losses in new ways--the collection's commitment to precision is compelling and evocative. A dense text that relies on prose poems, the collection also has a kind of lightness, an energy that carries us through.

[Gabrielle Bates · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interspersed with lineated lyrics, the prose poems that make up the majority of this book are full of direct addresses and sonic riffs, Biblical allusions part persona, part new translation, a world of high and ancient thought punctuated by hints and snippets of a recent romantic betrayal, which reads as the book’s true core, an instigating occasion considered in periphery, too raw perhaps, to be looked at straight. The tension between what is looked at and not looked at, said and unsaid, accumulates across the collection until, eventually, everything begins to break into a kneel.

In Small Gods, the feeling is so deep, thought becomes proportional in height. Reading this book for the first time, I was consistently awed by the poet’s ability to stretch for miles in every direction the heart, the mind, and language itself. This is simultaneously one of the most achesome and intellectual collections I’ve ever read.

[Kirsten · Rating 3 out of 5]

These poems are technically outstanding and beautiful, but I had trouble finding my way into them. The collection feels cerebral in a way that’s not to my taste.

[Lynnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Matthew need never write anything else again in his life, for this is the thing I am fond of. It starts out slow; the graze of the cold blade at your low back just before the blood is drawn. He makes many things clear in this book: that he paid attention in his foundational Ancient Greek courses, that he was a pathetic Catholic, etc. But there are other things which are less clear but stand out to those who know them biblically.

I was unprepared to confront my own complicity in my failed relationship. I was unprepared to hear about my own mother. I was unprepared to be reminded of my own complicated, miserable relationship with my falible human body, and Small Gods forced all of these things on me.

Matthew, when I said I wanted to bleed, I did not mean this much. Fabulous job.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Small Gods is an interesting book of mostly prose poems--interesting in its intelligence, often in its language, and in both its successes and failures. Sections one and three, which feature epistles from St. Paul among other things, I found particularly compelling for the pace where heart and mind meet in poetic endeavor--that combination of reverie, play, and thought. The middle section, with its poems named after letters for the Greek alphabet comes off less successfuly: the poems are less engaging, more consumed with their own mission and language than taking the reader with them.

[Evan]

"Eventually, perhaps inevitably, we arbitrarily
approach the limit of this function. We can try to
find where there's still growth, if and only if there
exist positive numbers. But we both know the
argument is tending toward infinity; all simpler
functions seem spent. Sufficiently large. Suitably
close. It seems, once again, we're left with X."