Destroyer and Preserver

by Matthew Rohrer

"Rohrer has an enchanting willingness to look outward, a willingness not to grasp the world using old means which have failed us, even if no new means present themselves ready-made."openly and with a generous presence.From "Dull Affairs":How am I to concentrateon the heavy and dullaffairs of statewith the sound of a baby having a dreamin the other roomMatthew Rohrer is the author of five previous books of poetry, including A Plate of Chicken, Rise Up, Satellite, and A Green Light, which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also co-author of Nice Hat. Thanks. with Joshua Beckman, with whom he has participated in performances at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. He received the Pushcart Prize and his first book, A Hummock in the Malookas, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at New York University.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2011

About the author

Matthew Rohrer is the author of Destroyer and Preserver (forthcoming from Wave Books in 2011), A Plate of Chicken (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), Rise Up (Wave Books, 2007) and A Green Light (Verse Press, 2004), which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Satellite (Verse Press, 2001), and co-author, with Joshua Beckman, of Nice Hat. Thanks. (Verse Press, 2002), and the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He has appeared on NPR's "All Things Considered" and "The Next Big Thing." His first book, A Hummock in the Malookas was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver in 1994. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches in the undergraduate writing program at NYU.

For more information on this author, go to:
http://www.wavepoetry.com/authors/32-...

Reviews

[Donald Armfield]

Matthew Rohrer collection is metaphor, dry humor
Rohrer's style is basic, but the way he uses his words gives his poems meanings in different ways. Depending on how you look at it. My favorites:

★From Mars
★Dull Affairs
★Poem For Music's Distractions
★Flowers
★Pie
★Good Morning

Here is a quote from poem titled Flowers

I go boil my head
in my bedroom
until every bell begins
to clang for freedom.

[Eric T. Voigt]

Trying to condense an author’s two-decadesish-spanning body of work into a month is giving me this bizarre perspective of hyper-evolution. No more full sentences. Maybe only enough periods to count on one poet’s fingers through in the whole collection. Concentrating on loneliness and longing. I smiled through five of the poems? The rest of them left me needing someone to hold or needing a second to stare off into the middle distance and emotionally regroup before moving on. Destroyer and Preserver is as blunt a statement of “I’m a grown-up now” as they come. Alright. Shake it off. Or, well, no, sink back into for a while. There’s a strange comfort in its revelatory hopeful- v. hopelessness. Favorite lines time!: "I'm a little/hungover that night they/rise from their table/and steal my car/Motherfucker stole my car/and that was my/grandma's car I liked/how it looked here/in the city with/some stickers on it/the police just nodded/it had my grandfather's/three-pound hammer in/the trunk there is/no place on the/form to put this."

[Frances Dinger]

I accidentally started talking to Matthew Rohrer in a bar during APRIL (Authors, Publishers & Readers of Independent Literature), an annual literary festival in Seattle. I had only ever seen pictures of him with his mustache. He no longer has a mustache.

As a man, he is as kind as his poems.

Some favorite lines/stanzas:

"I thought of a
gentler way to rid
us of the ants
we could just wait"

"I do not belong to anything but books
which is very sad"

"she stepped into her wineglass
as the sun brought everything
a little closer to raspberries"

"like how? Like given

the choice to do something

stupid or to sit in a chair

everyone leaps up"

[Christopher]

Each poem is almost a single sentence, expertly drawn out and enjambed into so many beautiful combinations.

[Richard Chiem]

one of the best things i've ever read

[Victors]

"What is More Distracting Than Clouds" and "Casualties" are fantastic.

[Benjamin Niespodziany]

So many lines in this collection that are full of awe. Matthew Rohrer is becoming one of my favorite poets. This collection might be his finest.

[A L]

Rohrer plants you in the most specific locales with the simplest phrases.

[Simone]

This collection, of standard width but nonstandard height, swoops over others like an office complex full of aspiring poets. I felt uneasy about references to babies, adult alcohol use, sleeplessness. It’s strikingly wrong for me right now.

Rohrer must notice how often he mentions ghosts, clouds, and sunset-reddened things. But I didn’t gain depth from repetition. Instead it jarred me and lessened the image’s effectiveness. One poem ends, “and we have no way/ to reach them” which I liked, but I couldn’t appreciate when another concluded with “all the people…that can’t reach us now.” Two otherwise distinct poems start with “We have some sad news this morning from Mars.” Enough similarity to detect repetition, but not enough to grasp a pattern.

Sometimes he replaces all instances of “and” with ampersands. Sigh.

I did appreciate Rohrer’s line breaks, which topple thoughts like dominoes and interrupt clauses. In “Believe,” this effect echoes a journey to an unknown destination. It shifts between places: filling out paperwork, night on the train, school, etc., and ends with waiting, a non-ending. The split line breaks propel the narrator coherently through shifting settings.

Reading a poetry collection in one sitting is not ideal. Poetry is to be savored, so a few re-reads would likely yield more favorable discoveries.

[Ed Skoog]

I feel destroyed and preserved.