Contradictions in the Design
Contradictions in the Design
Matthew Olzmann
“The poems in Olzmann’s [Contradictions in the Design] thrill the reader with straightforward insights regarding the natural and human world thanks to their humor, diversity of topics, startling metaphors and profound observations.”
—Tupelo Quarterly
November 2016
ISBN: 9781938584275
Available in print and digital formats.
Matthew Olzmann is the author of two collections of poems from Alice James Books: Mezzanines, which was selected for the Kundiman Prize, and Contradictions in the Design. His writing has appeared in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Brevity and elsewhere. He’s been awarded fellowships from the Kresge Arts Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the MacDowell Colony. Currently, he teaches at Dartmouth College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
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Additional Praise:
“Contradictions in the Design is a firehouse of a book—heaven-bent and relieved toward elemental mysteries that it resists and celebrates. Telegraphing the factories of Detroit, our familiar and strange American homes, the vast Blue Ridge, Olzmann guides us toward a hard-earned gratefulness that can exist when in the presence of impossible questions. We are not given easy answers but lucid and heartbreaking portraits of a brave conscientiousness. Olzmann is the one to watch.”
—Sarah Gambito
“Matthew Olzmann’s poetry is that rare thing that embraces complication while, at every turn, filling us with wonder. Contradictions in the Design incorporates ‘patterns among celestial bodies, the mysteries of Christ, X + Y, crossword puzzles, free will,’ but also the playfulness and oddities of life that allow us to laugh hardest at ourselves. Desire, Supervillains, Moby, and ‘the idea of Moby’: prepare yourself to be dazzled.”
—C. Dale Young
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More by Matthew Olzmann:
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Matthew Olzmann
“There’s something inherently spiritual about Olzmann’s Mezzanines. . . . It’s a place of reflection and contemplation, a temporary reprieve from the world’s chaos and a reach for a vision of paradise.”
—The Los Angeles Review of Books
April 2013
ISBN: 9781882295982