Goodnight Architecture: Poems

Product Description Poetry. "Gretchen Mattox's Goodnight Architecture is a fine example of a collection that houses mind and heart harmoniously. She has read her Louise Gluck and learned from her without being derivative in the least: `it must have tasted like grief, the narrative flame. Nothing fit again, a miscalculation of weather.' Small words (`again') carry so much weight in these poems, working to add texture and emotional complexity. So important--the difference between `Nothing fit' and Nothing fit again' and Mattox knows this difference, feels it, lives it"--Martha Rhodes. Review "One of Mattox's most acute poetic gifts lies in her skill for figurative language: rotating dryers are compared to mandalas, a litter of opened telephone books on the freeway to a flock of birds, twilight is 'as sensual as an exposed thigh.' Mattox has learned from Plath not only the gift of transforming the personal into the poetic, but also the ability to renderthe ordinary into the ecstatic. . ."-- "Slope" Review “In this delicate, beautiful, yet often heartbreaking collection, Gretchen Mattox peels back the layers of daily social convention and hardened family mythologies to reveal the viscous and resonant sorrows beneath. Whether reckoning the constellation of a broken home, the speaker’s passage to young adulthood, or the disintegration of a passionate relationship, Goodnight Architecture offers us poems of rich psychological density and unerring lyric grace.” (David St. John) About the Author GRETCHEN MATTOX has been a fellow at the Edward Albee Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo, as well as an instructor at The New School for Social Research, Antioch University, and Loyola Marymount University. She has lived in numerous places, including Denver, Provincetown, and New York City, and currently resides in Santa Monica, California. Her third poetry collection, The Flower Compass Sutras, is forthcoming.