Simulacra

Matthews’s deft, shape-shifting debut, winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, investigates the parameters of want and rebellion as a host of historical literary figures confront 21st-century life. In one sense, rebellion is the necessary tactic of “a dead addict’s daughter” who knows well that “Desire is spacious/ Want’s in the DNA,” and yet is determined to resist. However, it’s not a simple dichotomy between desire and refusal: want itself can be a kind of rebellion against scarcity, as when in “Hero(i)n” the speaker asks “how// heron// made him fly// why heron// made him// well, less starved.” Egyptian war goddess Sekhmet, home from war, considers how she has been “Forced to raise/ my unpainted face for a muddy flag and slake/ my thirst with my own long, hard swallow.” Narcissus, in whose story the notion of want meets that of the eponymous simulacrum, appears frequently, and quotations from Baudrillard lend the book structure. There are also fables, an opera, epistolary exchanges, tweets, and text exchanges with Anne Sexton. The wide range of forms enacts a kind of aesthetic voraciousness and refusal, though the collection itself is brief and without excesses. Matthews surveys the possible responses to what seems ineluctable, offering a work of intrepid imagination, inquiry, and strength. (Apr.)