Matthea Harvey

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Matthea Harvey is a contemporary American poet. She has published three collections, Modern Life (Graywolf Press, 2007), Sad Little Breathing Machine (Graywolf Press, 2004), and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books, 2000), and authored the forthcoming children's book, The Little General and The Giant Snowflake (Soft Skull Press, 2008). She has served as the poetry editor of American Letters & Commentary as well as a contributing editor to jubilat and BOMB. She currently lives in New York City and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.[1]

Harvey's Modern Life, a poetry collection "obsessed with devastated worlds and hybrid forms of life," [2] was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award. [3] The two longest poems in the collection, the “Terror of the Future” and “The Future of Terror,” are abecedarian sequences that examine "the dysfunction between civilian and military populations in a stark, futuristic environment." [4] was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Although Harvey herself has said that she "didn’t set out to write political poems," but to explore "that idea of living in the middle of contradiction—in the grey area, between yes and no."[5] the two poems were nonetheless acclaimed by The New York Times as "among the most arresting poems yet written about the current American political atmosphere . . . all the more surprising coming from a writer whose sensibility seems so resistant to our usual ideas about 'political poetry.'"[6]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Interview with Matthea Harvey at Bookslut
  2. ^ Interview with Matthea Harvey at the Poetry Foundation
  3. ^ The National Book Critics Circle
  4. ^ Interview with Matthea Harvey at the Poetry Foundation
  5. ^ Interview with Matthea Harvey, Tarpaulin Sky, August 2006
  6. ^ Review of Modern "Life in The New York Times, 17 February 2008

[edit] External Links

This American poet-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.