Matthew Minicucci is the author of one previous collection of poetry, Translation, chosen by Jane Hirshfield for the 2014 Wick Poetry Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Wick Poetry Center, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received his MFA. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2014, The Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner Elizabeth and their cat, Puck.
"Small Gods by Matthew Minicucci is one of the most beautiful,
moving, and intelligent books of poetry I've read in I don't know
how long. These poems and prose poems draw from sources as
heterogeneous as the Pauline letters, the natural sciences,
mathematics and astronomy in order to explore, inhabit, celebrate
and mourn the mutability of love, the vulnerabilities of attachment
and the unlikely, random and evanescent nature of existence itself.
The depth and variety of metaphor mirrors the depth and variety of
this poet's remarkable curiosity and openness to the world, in all
its glory and horror. The poems stick to memory like burrs to a
pant leg."--Alan Shapiro
"Small Gods reads like a sacred text with a tambourine keeping beat
behind each verse. Matthew Minicucci manages to conjure not only
the collective spirit but also the collective yearning that we may
not give permission to express in our day-to-day lives. Whether
rendering the quotidian or the biblical--and both appear,
seamlessly--these poems ask all the right questions, which are
really the answers to our concerns: 'What if silence was the
smallest unit of measure for distance between two people. An
imaginary number.' Or, what if, for instance, 'The fear that light
might only be within; or lost beneath a candle's douter, ' could be
spoken? Minicucci allows the exploration--and the dread and the
hope and the longing--to come to the surface of our lives and he
invites us to join in. Amen!"--A. Van Jordan
"Matthew Minicucci's new book is a balm for our time. In a quiet
voice, he counsels, 'Wait, and watch...' Devoid of rhetoric, easy
outrage, and exhortation, Minicucci advocates, instead, for the
transformative power of close-up scrutiny - poetry's timeless way
of looking that encourages the nuanced narratives of 'small gods'
living in the margins and crevices of everyday life to rise into
view. This is a book of rare intelligence, deep wisdom, and
exquisite linguistic beauty. Small Gods enriches us with its moral
courage and its compassionate faith in the ultimate value of our
fraught humanity."--Kate Daniels
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