Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form
Matthea Harvey
These poems are wildly imploding narratives held together by hinged lines: in one, a world revolves around a mystical bicycle repairman, in another, everyone lives in a minaret. In political allegory and painterly landscape, philosophic story and dramatic monologue, they describe a moment when something marvelous and unforeseen alters the course of a single day, a year, or an entire life. Comic, elegaic, and always formally intricate, this collection takes a second and third look at bathtubs, glaciers, and "want, that glass-bottomed boat."
"...Mournfully comic and syntactically inventive, Harvey’s poems are both
pleas for attentiveness...and elegies for the images we try, but fail, to capture."
—The New Yorker
"Many
poems issue from a space of Wonderland-like decadence, where 'tiny tin
gutters would be gauche,/ pathetically mimetic:' and 'irritated he would play with his/
Chameleon putting her on a paisley pillow or tartan/ Scarf.' There is a foreboding to such
scenes, and a toughness to Harvey’s speakers.... The imagination and syntactic dexterity [these poems] display are remarkable."
—Publishers Weekly
"'Dear dust-ghost,' writes Matthea Harvey in this beautiful first collection, 'the
instructions don’t make sense unless I sing them.' And indeed, it is her fine music
which manifests Harvey’s seriousness right from one’s first encounter with her
voice. Later, it is the pairing of profound spiritual confinement with crisp, almost at
times unleashed, longing, which come to gird the music’s muscular activity. That the
poems are mostly one form or another of prayer is abundantly clear; that they gaze bluntly
into the vacant stare of an apparently exhausted life-force is also clear and makes for
exciting tonalities of spiritual and emotional engagement. 'I would have liked an answer,'
she mutters, finally, and 'I know how to kneel, that’s all.' The stubborn anger feels
generous, urgent, and savingly committed to beauty."
—Jorie Graham
about the author
Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the
Human Form is Matthea Harvey's first book. Her poems have appeared in such magazines as American Poetry
Review, Grand Street, the New Yorker and Volt. She is the poetry editor of
American Letters & Commentary and works at BOMB Magazine. She has taught
creative writing at the Warren Wilson low-residency MFA program, and currently
teaches at Pratt University. She lives in Brooklyn.
Author photo by Brian Lennon
two poems from pity the bathtub its forced embrace of the human form
an interview with matthea harvey on bookslut.com
