Poetry. Matt Shears's new chapbook of poems, 10,000 WALLPAPERS, is a phenomenal hybrid that borrows from many genres and operates on many levels. It's fun, experimental, mythic, mealy-mouthed and unprotected. Sonically, it's flabbergasting, but never flabby. Thematically it's indefinable but refined, self-reflexive and aware but awkward as a first kiss, or a first kill. It operates almost as a misheard fable traveling from ice age to Ave C, a place where Masque meets Western, where the Renaissance slips into its finest Greek to watch a dreamy commedia dell'arte production. It's a place where heroes come unhinged, their singing severed from our fullest judgment by lost or destroyed pages, or who perhaps are being unsung themselves by a culture separating itself at its seams. In the end it's a joyride. Or an open letter to a mastodon from an endangered element. Or each of us, emptied on an open page like some beautiful thing.
Author City: OAKLAND, CA USA
Matt Shears was born and raised in northeast Ohio. He graduated from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and was a Schaeffer Fellow at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. He currently lives in Oakland, California, with his wife and daughter and their three cats. He is the author of 10,000 WALLPAPERS (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2011) and WHERE A ROAD HAD BEEN (BlazeVOX [books], 2010).
“Amidst a rural landscape bombarded with technology and the aftermath of history (both real and imagined), Shears creates poems of wonder and wandering, poems of longing and regret. Tidbits of mythology collide with folksongs and lullabies to create a fantastic place where ‘the Poem arises beauteous’ yet ‘false projects glitter in the wind.’ In these poems, bits and pieces of broken things do not add up to or equal their whole. Shears’s range of voice and unpredictable grace provide an exquisite backbone to the time/place/space that encompasses this vibrant collection.”—Megan Johnson
“This is very unusual collection of poems, a formidable departure from the nation’s workshops. The rhythms and cadences of these Alter(n)ations imitate and celebrate the life forms that inhabit our lives. I take Matt Shears’s work seriously and with respect.”—Alex Kuo
“Matt Shears invents new worlds in 10,000 WALLPAPERS. This long lyric is full of brute terror and bucolic beauty, exploring individual consciousness unmoored by our present ‘thundering interconnectivity’; 10,000 WALLPAPERS chronicles ‘the everyman meandering through this digitized countryside,’ questioning how we can truly inhabit the world when reality has become denatured by the image. The speaker in this poem sings like Prufrock, in a lyric that is searing and true, as he searches for the possibilities of pure utterance and perception amidst what is manufactured.”—Cathy Park Hong