Sonnet

Matthew Rohrer

Alone in a foreign cityhaving a drink.Missing you.Nursing the drink for a while.I heard a familiar songcoming over the water.I said what if we namedour baby Sonnet, later;at the time you couldn’t hear me.I sat on the dockunderneath vast gantriesand felt an antique crackin my heart.But I figured I would make it.

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Matthew Rohrer is the author of 11 books of poems, most recently ARMY OF GIANTS, published by Wave Books. He attended the Iowa Writers Workshop, was a co-founder of Fence Magazine and teaches writing at NYU. One of his tattoos has appeared in 2 books of literary tattoos.

Matthew Rohrer's Army of Giants is a diverse meditation on the ways in which the physical world intersects, overlaps, and informs the universe of the imagination.

Formally audacious, these are poems that playfully engage with word constraint, iambic pentameter, and long-sentence forms, keeping us in a constant state of surprise and curiosity. By sanctifying everything from lava lamps, cemeteries, and clouds to literary heroes such as Anna Ahkmatova, Chika Sagawa, and Lewis Warsh, Matthew Rohrer continues his project of uncovering wonder wherever it can found. In poems that rise and build toward a gigantic peak at the center, Army of Giants provides new poetic vistas from which we can contemplate the worlds we inhabit.

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