Gold Cure

by Ted Mathys

Lustrous, tender, and expansive, Gold Cure moves from boomtown gold mines and the mythical city of El Dorado to the fracking wells of the American interior, excavating buried histories, legacies of conquest, and the pursuit of shimmering ideals. Ted Mathys skewers police brutality on the ribs of a nursery rhyme and drives Petrarchan sonnets into shale fields deep under the prairies. In crystalline language rich with allegory and wordplay, Mathys has crafted a moving elegy for the Anthropocene.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

Published September 15, 2020

About the author

Ted Mathys is the author of four books of poetry including, most recently, Gold Cure (Coffee House Press, 2020). His honors include fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Poetry Society of America, and Saint Louis Regional Arts Commission. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and lives in St. Louis, where he teaches at Saint Louis University and curates the 100 Boots Poetry Series at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading, the two ways one has of approaching the book get resolved. Miner I am, I was looking for poems, but found I like Ted Mathys better at a distance, in a long vista, and began to wonder if I hadn't better go back to re-read the four [long] narrative/sequence/crown/lyric essays that structure what Mathys is trying to say about gold.

In the mid-Eighties, when South Africa had Mandela in jail and American civil rights waves broke upon American universities, with their endowments invested in stock portfolios full of companies in violation of the Sullivan Amendments, meant to protect the indigenous population laboring in the diamond mines, American students did jail time to express solidarity with Mandela and for those miners. Mathys, part of a later cohort, represents himself as a father, and a concerned citizen, and in the sonnet-crown, called "Shale Plays," something more peculiar: a former activist-institutional lobbyist with a close friend in the oil-and-gas business. The "plays" are a set of natural gas residua on the lower 48 and in "Barnett," one sonnet from the crown, a father flies into Dallas-Fort Worth with his daughter as he characterizes for her what "frack pads" are, as well as the "halo effect" of pride the industry has in all the important industrial consumables made from oil, gas and LNG. In the volume's concluding sequence of narrative verse-paragraphs, or haibun, "Ring Cycle," Mathys ditches between a summary of a Mister Rogers' Neighborhood telecast he watches with his daughter and various mythologies of gold and merit he and his wife have inherited, even as they entrust Fred Rogers to point a good moral. The family closes on this wisdom in some faith in the meritocratic justice sanctifying their anger. However, the volume's first long poem, "El Dorado" about a visit the poet makes to Eldorado, Illinois (about a 100 miles due south of where my people are from, Logatee) suggests the criminal basis of our sanctification in gold's justice. Eldorado was a sundown town, meaning a town inhospitable to blacks -- this suggests for Mathys the ways the Jim Crow=era justice system always sanctified itself in appeals to the annals of a cool [legal] bar.

Gold, then, on this account, "gaslights" us into believing about ourselves a flattering reality. The "Keys to the Kingdom" of that self-flattery requires of readers that they descend through the formal registers of children's speculative play as well as the adult desire to discover the playing forward through generations that would keep the earth household alive. It's in the unfolding forms of these poetic speculations that Mathys plays beyond his own desire -- like Fred Rogers -- to point a good message.

[Cordelia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this poetry. It was really good. It had a roughness and rawness that really appealed to me.

[AngieA Allen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to create a shelf for poetry which shows how often I read it. This was interesting. And insightful into the poet...I think. I'm sure it deserves a higher rating than I gave it; consider the source.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A nice occasional evening companion for a few months. Congrats, Ted.

[tatiana · Rating 3 out of 5]

3⭐️ i enjoyed some parts like the last section was very loopy circular and ended and its lowk a political book sometimes and ngl i liked it it seems scary i like that we live in a country with free speech :D