MATTHEW GAVIN FRANK was born and raised in Illinois. He has previously published in The New Republic, Field, The Best Food Writing 2006, The Best Travel Writing 2008, Tampa Review, Epoch, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, North American Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Creative Nonfiction, Willow Springs, Bellingham Review, Pleiades, The Florida Review, Ninth Letter, Rosebud, 6x6, Bat City Review, Gastronomica, The Madison Review, Cimarron Review, The Literary Review, The Journal and others. His work has been featured online at The Tupelo Press Poetry Project and Verse Daily. He received the 2005 Summer Fellowship from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, a 2006 Artist's Grant from the Vermont Studio Center, and a 2008 Fellowship in Prose from the Illinois Arts Council. He is the author of the chapbook Aardvark (West Town Press), BAROLO (forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press) the chapbook Four Hours to Mpumalanga (Pudding House Publications), and Sagittarius Agitprop, available from Black Lawrence Press.

MATTHEW GAVIN FRANK

Contemporary Literature & Non-Fiction

Matthew Frank's new collection of poems exchanges ideas for music and music for pictures, with completely unexpected freshness and velocity--and this is not the experience of surrealism, but of a current realism that is hastening with the times. And these times are often rude and beyond all correction and all comparison. This book is sort of miraculous.  I love it.

-Norman Dubie, author of The Mercy Seat

In Matthew Gavin Frank's splendid debut collection, Sagittarius Agitprop, poem after poem is unswervingly bold and astonishing.  "Parts of a Feather," to give an illustration, may be grounded in the experience of newlyweds home from a rainy honeymoon in Venice, but its opening announces that something very different from a personal narrative is at work in a Frank poem: "The superstitious geometry of the rock dove rests/ between its first and fifth rib.  And you// rest between it, poised as water.  It’s easy/ to call you a disease.  Better: a heart or rain[.]"  These are striking lines and they move into a startling meditation on art, life, union, and mortality: "Of course, you say, my hands// are the skeletons of everything with wings . . ./ A feather // stripped of barbs is bone."  Frank is a master of deft balance between the material of experience and lyric transformation, never losing his poetic footing or his sense of humor.  As the speaker hilariously observes: "A marriage license/ makes a lousy umbrella" ("Parts of a Feather").  These poems are inventive, fearless, and wise.  To be Frank, I think he walks on the water that is the page!

- Cynthia Hogue, author of The Incognito Body and Flux