Two New Books — Trey Moody, Farid Matuk

Trey Moody‘s Climate Reply, new from New Michigan Press. $9.

from Dear Ghosts:

3. Pinecones on the coffee table

And this won’t do. One on the stove,
one under my bed sheets. You know

this just won’t work. If cinnamon
smells like the hands of a baby,

then, by nightfall, I just don’t want
to smell anything that’s alive.

4. Hum of the fridge like thought

No matter the temperature–
the banana cut in half

always turns brown. Add this
to the list. When I open the fridge

in the middle of the night, I can hear
you thinking behind me.

Farid Matuk, This Isa Nice Neighborhood, new from Letter Machine Editions, $14.

As You Accompany Your Death

“Dear reader,” you said to me upon my birth
“the following accounts are guaranteed
by nothing, but have been lovingly bound.”

Now you’re dying. You keep thinking about it.

I offer you this: a once-told likeness of you pushes off
your funerary canoe onto the sumpter side and turns back
to a small beach crowded with loose gangs
of your likeness in floppy sun hats
over blinking eyes, and says to them, “sisters
and sister, this is how she approaches me.”

As You Accompany Your Death

“this is how she approaches me
set lone on the seeming body
of the Pacific.” To which you say, “No.

Honey, pull open the little window
try to listen to the waves. To put it
in your terms the ocean swallows

those girls as the things I told you about me
and every dish in the small but much loved number
of American trains we sometimes rode

and the trains themselves go down.
The sound of these things breaking
is the shelled call-note of the waves

and of herself, the seeming body of the Pacific
is what your mother made.”

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2 Responses to Two New Books — Trey Moody, Farid Matuk

  1. Kent Johnson says:

    Haven’t seen the Moody book, but I do have the Matuk.

    Whoa.

    If the first one was the King, this one IS Ishmael.

    Kent

  2. dhadbawnik says:

    Trey was a colleague of mine from MFA school — this is his first book.

    I agree — Farid’s book is something to behold…

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