Textual Records
“Rader has quickly gone from being a poet to watch to one of the poets to watch.”
— Zachariah Wells, ARC
A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno carries within it all the technique, vision, imaginative labour, and razor-sharp precision of Matt Rader’s first two collections but ascends, also, to a new and luminous, demanding, particularized realm of the human.
Wildflowers and weeds, newspaper archives and illness, hostels and hostiles, parenting and the shadowy history of grandparents, war and Renaissance paintings: Matt Rader’s unassuming, deeply spirited, and expansive poems show us again how contemporary lyric can go such a long way toward revealing our true homes to us at the moment we find ourselves most nakedly un-housed. Rader seeks out limits, borders, and frontiers — those mapped for us by authority, and the concomitant, interior shadow-lines we ourselves draw — in order to test their validity. If Borges had imagined an atlas of our layered identities, it might look like these poems. This is an astounding collection from a thrilling voice in poetry.
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The critically acclaimed second collection of poetry by the author of Miraculous Hours.
“Living Things thrives.” —George Elliott Clarke, Halifax Chronicle-Herald
Written in the year after the birth of Matt Rader’s first daughter, Living Things honestly introduces the contradictions of the modern world: “how what we see in daylight is less than whole / and also more so.” Using words in lieu of sonar, these poems bounce off the ecology of “shabby saturated grasses” and “panther-eyed armies of salal,” and locate both author and reader within a literary genealogy. Matt Rader’s poetry brings subtle slowness to a chaotic, fast-paced environment. It is both celebration and documentation of this world and its relationship to all living things.
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NOMINATED FOR THE 2006 GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD
Matt Rader’s debut collection is the fierce and tender retelling of our first “miraculous hours”—those early significant-and-strange interactions with the ones we love and the world we live in. From a world where wild dogs slide like ghosts into homes, water towers are “giant blue bullets unexploded in the earth” and walls are tortured to talk, Matt Rader forms a meticulously crafted reflection on how the events, experiences and environment of our early lives shape our sense of faith, our strongest convictions, and the map of the world we carry with us.
