Poetry. "Joel Chace's MATTER NO MATTER flexes language across its boundaries and beyond our wildest dreams. This encyclopedic collection, hybrid in diction and form, and in its rupture of diction and form, speaks with a collection of male voices present and past 'bubbling and breaking'. Chace's knowledge is portable, and he carries his relentless questions as time and space shuttle back and forth. 'How many stand a jazzer's chance,' he asks in a poignant series of prose elegies to a 'just dead' father at the heart of the book: 'someone was even missing hearing the breathing but the breathing still went on went up to a whiteness up to a kindness.' Other poems deploy wit and irony to take language down to the letter and transform it homophonically--in 'dett tried us,' for instance, 'dsire' morphs into 'its / tit / drie / uteris /dust' then into 'its / diet / ire / rues / rust.' Language that begins as a matter of stones, snow, and grass becomes the 'under-word / all made / of quarks / which are or are / not matter but certainly are not / meaning.' Likewise, in Chace's multivalent vision, everything that matters is also of no matter--story / layered upon story stories without / matter but with meaning.' In this book of struggle and the resolve to survive it, he leaves us with the overwhelming question: 'how is it possible to live like / this'"--Heather Thomas.

Author City: MERCERSBURG, PA USA

Joel Chace has published poetry and prose poetry in print and electronic magazines such as 6ix, Tomorrow, Lost and Found Times, Coracle, xStream, Three Candles, 2River View, Joey & the Black Boots, Recursive Angel, and Veer. He has published more than a dozen print and electronic collections, including Translations From After (anabasis/extant, 2004) and drawer (xPressed/Lulu, 2005). He is a NEH Fellow. For many years, Chace has been Poetry Editor for the experimental electronic magazine 5_Trope.

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