Durable Goods
Suzanne Matson
"Evident throughout Durable Goods is Suzanne Matson's
connection to family—be it her original one, or the 'imaginary family' the couple is
impatient for in the book's title poem. What she calls 'our invisible kinship/ with
strangers, this instinct of mattering/ to each other, however briefly' animates too the
poet's travel across geographic and temporal boundaries: to Greek brothers lost at sea, a
girl murdered by her boyfriend in Boston, a 19th-century woman voyager and author. Against
inevitable disappointments and apparent losses, Matson's crystalline poems offer
redemption. They 'bring the lost back home.'"
—Carole Simmons Oles
"Suzanne Matson's poems about the strangeness of our relations with ourselves,
others, and the world move from the sensuality particular to ideas at times wry, at times
startling...These poems are durable in every sense of the word."
—Brendan Galvin
"Matson's specialty is writing about strangers: a woman selling flowers on a railroad
platform, a toddler whose destitute father swats her in a bus station, a heavyset Italian
boy playing ball. The shadowy figures who inhabit these poems are as unfamiliar to the
speaker as they are to the reader, but the poet's deft eye catches them midstride at the
moment of decision, resulting in poems that are wholly accessible...The overall impression
is one of intimacy, poet and reader taking a long, hard look, as if the Other were a
constant mirror."
—Publisher's Weekly
about the author
Suzanne Matson is the author of three novels and two books of poetry. Sea Level and Durable Goods were published in 1990 and 1993 from Alice James Books; her novels are The Hunger Moon (1997), A Trick of Nature (2000) and The Tree-Sitter (2006), all from W. W. Norton. Since 1988 she has taught at Boston College, where she is a Professor of English. Originally from Portland Oregon, and educated at Portland State University and the University of Washington, she now lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with her husband and three sons.
