From a dazzling, award-winning young poet, a collection that paints life as a celebration in the dark. At the center of Mayakovsky’s Revolver is the suicide of Matthew Dickman’s older brother. “Known for poems of universality of feeling, expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending allure” (Major Jackson), Dickman is a powerful poet whose new collection explores how to persevere in the wake of grief. from “Mayakovsky’s Revolver” I keep thinking about the way blackberries will make the mouth of an eight year old look like he’s a ghost that’s been shot in the face. In the dark I can see my older brother walking through the tall brush of his brain. I can see him standing in the lobby of the hotel, alone, crying along with the ice machine.

Mayakovsky's Revolver: Poems

Self-Help

Dickman, Matthew

Death & Grief

W.W.Norton&Company

Review\n"Tender and troubling, dark and glowing." 
― San Francisco Chronicle\n"There is an unabashed rapture to these poems.… How astounding, and how perfectly troubling, to be led through this fearsome, familiar realm of choked silences and violent collisions by an intelligence as deft and buoyant as Matthew Dickman’s." 
― Tracy K. Smith\n"It’s not possible to stop reading this book once you start, because it’s to the bone, every word, no window dressing, no artifice, no high-fat content." 
― Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books\n"My first thought about the poems in Matthew Dickman’s new collection, Wonderland, was: Why doesn’t every poet write this way?… I wish others wrote with Dickman’s clarity and ability to engage.… These poems light both heart and mind. They stab you with memory’s shiny knife. ‘Ouch,’ you say, and then ‘thank you.’" 
― David Kirby, New York Times\n"[Dickman’s] ability not only to recollect but also to relive his childhood in the present moment, as if boy and man coexisted and conversed with each other, manifests a hard-won wisdom." 
― Library Journal\n"The poems are ferocious and hardened by a backdrop of addiction and poverty.… In Dickman’s poems, readers observe as the bright-eyed potential of youth is shattered by the devastation of adulthood’s onset." 
― Publishers Weekly\n"[Dickman’s] imagination, the possibility of better, helped him filter and preserve from the sharp and rusty clutter the beautiful moments of childhood. Thus, the collection relates a sweetness it should by all accounts be unable to render." 
― Brian Juenemann, Register-Guard\n"Dickman reenters youth in all its peaks and valleys―without exaggeration or cliché.… While many of Dickman’s poems tell stories and carry narratives across poems, they also follow their own meandering logic, like a late night conversation." 
― Emma Winters, America: The Jesuit Review\n"A wonderful new poetic voice writing warm and cozy visions of old Portland, Oregon. I loved it." 
― Gus Van Sant, Academy Award–nominated filmmaker\n"With Wonderland, Matthew Dickman captures the vicissitudes of childhood: the mess and wildness of it all, how we are both held and discarded, the way darkness subsumes the glow and vice versa. Dickman’s poems are deft and sparkling and never cease to tear into you with their profound rawness and beauty." 
― Carrie Brownstein, star of Portlandia and author of Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl\nMatthew Dickman engages the traces of his own living past in poems that “light both heart and mind” (David Kirby, New York Times). 
In the southeast Portland neighborhood of Matthew Dickman’s youth, parents are out of control and children are in chaos. Ghosts of longing, shame, and vulnerability haunt these luminous, hypnotic poems as Dickman confronts a childhood of ambient violence, well-intentioned but warped family relations, and confining definitions of identity. Wonderland reminds us that in neighborhoods filled with guns, skateboards, fights, booze, and heroin, and home to punk rockers, skinheads, poor kids, and single moms, we can also find innocence and love.

Wonderland: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Luminous and hypnotic, this dynamic collection explores the dark edges of childhood, violence, race, class, and masculinity, by one of the most fearless poets of his generation.
"Known for poems of universality of feeling, expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending allure" (Major Jackson), award-winning poet Matthew Dickman returns with a collection that engages the traces of his own living past, suffusing these poems with ghosts of longing, shame, and vulnerability. In the southeast Portland neighborhood of Dickman’s youth, parents are out of control and children are in chaos. With grief, anger, and, ultimately, understanding, Dickman confronts a childhood of ambient violence, well-intentioned but warped family relations, confining definitions of identity, and the deprivation of this particular Portland neighborhood in the 1980s. Wonderland reminds us that, while these neighborhoods are filled with guns, skateboards, fights, booze, and heroin, and home to punk rockers, skinheads, poor kids, and single moms, they are also places of innocence and love.

Winner of the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award.
Matthew Dickman’s all-American poems are the epitome of the pleasure principle; as clever as they are, they refuse to have ulterior intellectual pretensions; really, I think, they are spiritual in characterfree and easy and unself-conscious, lusty, full of sensuous aspiration. . . . We turn loose such poets into our culture so that they can provoke the rest of us into saying everything on our minds.”Tony Hoagland, APR/Honickman First Book Prize judge
"Dickman crystallizes and celebrates human contact, reminding us...that our best memories, those most worth holding on to, those that might save us, will be memories of love....The background, then, is a downbeat America resolutely of the moment; the style, though, looks back to the singing free verse of Walt Whitman and Frank O'Hara....(Dickman's) work sings with all the crazy vereve of the West." Los Angeles Times
"Toughness with a smile....(Dickman) breathes the air of Whitman, Kerouac, O'Hara, and Koch, each of whom pushed against the grain of what poetry and writing was supposed to be in their times." New Haven Review
All American Poem plumbs the ecstatic nature of our daily lives. In these unhermetic poems, pop culture and the sacred go hand in hand. As Matthew Dickman said in an interview, he wants the people from the community that I come from”a blue-collar neighborhood in Portland, Oregonto get his poems. Also, I decided to include anything I wanted in my poems. . . . Pepsi, McDonald’s, the word ass.’”
There is no one to save us because there is no need to be saved. I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed the front yard. When the stranger wearing a sheer white dress covered in a million beads slinks toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life, I take her hand in mine. I spin her out and bring her in. This is the almond grove in the dark slow dance. It is what we should be doing right now. Scraping for joy . . .
Matthew Dickman is the winner of the May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a poetry editor of Tin House, and the coauthor, with brother Michael Dickman, of 50 American Plays. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

All-American Poem (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

American Poetry Review

“Matthew Dickman’s all-American poems are the epitome of the pleasure principle; as clever as they are, they refuse to have ulterior intellectual pretensions; really, I think, they are spiritual in character—free and easy and unself-conscious, lusty, full of sensuous aspiration. . . . We turn loose such poets into our culture so that they can provoke the rest of us into saying everything on our minds.”—Tony Hoagland, APR/Honickman First Book Prize judge
All American Poem plumbs the ecstatic nature of our daily lives. In these unhermetic poems, pop culture and the sacred go hand in hand. As Matthew Dickman said in an interview, he wants the “people from the community that I come from”—a blue-collar neighborhood in Portland, Oregon—to get his poems. “Also, I decided to include anything I wanted in my poems. . . . Pepsi, McDonald’s, the word ‘ass.’”
There is no one to save us because there is no need to be saved. I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed the front yard. When the stranger wearing a sheer white dress covered in a million beads slinks toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life, I take her hand in mine. I spin her out and bring her in. This is the almond grove in the dark slow dance. It is what we should be doing right now. Scraping for joy . . .
Matthew Dickman is from Portland, Oregon, and has been honored with writing fellowships from the Michener Center, Vermont Studio Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Husbandry: Poems

An intimate, moving volume of poems on the anxieties and love of single fatherhood and domestic life. Guided by acclaimed poet Matthew Dickman's signature "clarity and ability to engage" (David Kirby, New York Times), Husbandry is a love song from a father to his children. Written after a separation and during overwhelming single-fatherhood in the early days of COVID-19 lockdowns, Husbandry refuses romantic notions of parenting and embraces all its mess, anguish, humor, fear, boredom, and warmth. Dickman composes these poems entirely in vivid couplets that animate the various domestic pairs of broken-up parents, two sons, love and grief. He explores the terrain of his children's dreams and nightmares, the almost primal fears that spill into his own, and the residual impacts of his parents' failures. Threading his anxieties with bright moments of beauty and gratitude, the volume delights in seeing the world through the clear eyes of childhood and finds meaning in the domestic work--repetitive, exhausting, and sublime--of sustaining three lives. With tender, aching precision, Husbandry reveals the poet's hunger to be a husband without ever being one, and his search for a father that ends with becoming one himself.

Guided by acclaimed poet Matthew Dickman's signature "clarity and ability to engage" (David Kirby, New York Times), Husbandry is a love song from a father to his children. Written after a separation and during overwhelming single-fatherhood in the early days of COVID-19 lockdowns, Husbandry refuses romantic notions of parenting and embraces all its mess, anguish, humor, fear, boredom, and warmth. Dickman composes these poems entirely in vivid couplets that animate the various domestic pairs of broken-up parents, two sons, love and grief. He explores the terrain of his children's dreams and nightmares, the almost primal fears that spill into his own, and the residual impacts of his parents' failures. Threading his anxieties with bright moments of beauty and gratitude, the volume delights in seeing the world through the clear eyes of childhood and finds meaning in the domestic work--repetitive, exhausting, and sublime--of sustaining three lives. With tender, aching precision, Husbandry reveals the poet's hunger to be a husband without ever being one, and his search for a father that ends with becoming one himself.

"Their verse . . . is strikingly different. Michael's poems are interior, fragmentary, and austere, often stripped down to single-word lines; they seethe with incipient violence. Matthew's are effusive, ecstatic, and all-embracing, spilling over with pop-cultural references and exuberant carnality." —The New Yorker
Identical twins Michael and Matthew Dickman once invented their own language. Now they have invented an exhilarating book of poem-plays about the fifty states. Pointed, comic, and surreal, these one-page vignettes feature unusual staging and an eclectic cast of characters—landforms, lobsters, and historical figures including Duke Ellington, Sacajawea, Judy Garland, and Kenneth Koch, the avant-garde spirit informing this book introduced by playwright John Guare.
"Lucky in Kansas"
Judy Garland: This is always the worst part Tin Man: The coming back Judy Garland: Yes, it fucking sucks, it's depressing as shit The Lion: Well, we're lucky to still be employed at this farm Straw Man: I wouldn't call it lucky The Lion: We were lucky to get back Straw Man: That's not really lucky either I don't think you know what lucky means Judy Garland: It's funny what you miss Tin Man: The running Judy Garland: The flying Tin Man: The flying monkeys Judy Garland: The beautiful flying monkeys above the endless emeralds the unbelievably green world
Michael Dickman and Matthew Dickman are identical twins who were born and raised in Portland, Oregon. Michael received the 2010 James Laughlin Award for his second collection Flies (Copper Canyon Press, 2011). Matthew won the prestigious APR/Honickman Award for his debut volume, All-American Poem.

50 American Plays (Poems)

Dickman, Michael

Copper Canyon Press

Bookstore Clerks & Significant Others: Tsunami Press 1

Biographies & Memoirs

Laux, Dorianne

Hoffman, Nina Kiriki

McGriff, Michael

Babbs, Ken

Millar, Joseph

Witte, John

Scates, Maxine

Titus, Tom A.

Müller, Erik

Ihsan, Valerie

Rhodes, D. S.

Landfield, Scott

Root, Jenny

Hull, Meli

Bookman, Elly

Yoder, Kelsey

Mosley, Mose Tuzik

Dean, Bronwynn

Craven, Bob

Ellerhoff, S. G.

Casey, Deb

Cutean, Brian

Hagen, Cecelia

LaFleur, Jorah

McKenzie, Carter

Müller, Eve

Historical

Tsunami Press

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