Matt Donovan Selected Works

Matt Donovan’s The Dug-Up Gun Museum confronts our country’s obsession with guns to explore America’s deep-seated political divisions and issues linked to violence, race, power, and privilege. Taking its title from an actual museum located in Wyoming, this collection of poems interrogates our country’s history of gun violence, asking questions about our fetishization of weapons, how mass shootings and the killing of unarmed civilians by police have become normalized, and the multitudinous ways in which firearms are ingrained in our country’s culture. 

With funky tempos and stretched, staggering lines, Matt Donovan's new sequence interrogates the ways our daily lives teem with beauty and loss. Using figures engrained in American culture to portray collisions of pleasure with tragedy, he summons singers Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, athlete Babe Ruth, painters Paul Cezanne and John Singer Sargent, and musicians John Coltrane and Lou Reed to offer evidence for what creation can cost. A beloved music teacher who died prematurely is extolled by re-enacting his passion for both Bach and Scott Joplin, and the promise of a first pregnancy is juxtaposed with a surge of family funerals. As "each day lurches us toward ... / things dying, things newborn," the poet of Rapture & the Big Bam can be either a companion in mourning or a celebrant of unbeaten anticipation.

The title cloud of Matt Donavan’s extraordinary nonfiction debut, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape, refers to the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius that in 79 AD buried the city of Pompeii under twenty feet of ash. Today a remarkable 2.5 million people a year visit the ruins of the Italian city. It’s no surprise, then, that Donovan found the sacred place a site of inspiration and power, devoting six pieces to exploring the homes and villas that have been preserved. Donavan takes off from various points in the Roman ruins to explore the inconstancy of any given moment alongside the processes used to make casts of the vacancies left by the city’s dead to create positive monuments to their last gestures.

Nothing seems to be beyond the reach of this stunningly original writer. The pleasures he delivers in A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape have to do with the purity of his imagination, the flawless connections he makes from antiquity to the present, from personal experience to historical events, from architecture to art installation to literature. The redemptive power of beauty hovers over this spectacular work, reminding us that darkness and light make an inextricable pattern over our lives. Matt Donovan finds that the delicate balance to honor both, to find the subtle but ineffable rhythms between ruin and redemption, is to find what ultimately makes life worthwhile, what gives meaning to the sorrow and joy of being human.

Vellum, the exquisite debut collection from Matt Donovan, meditates on beauty, art, and the violence that is sometimes inherent in both. Here, he juxtaposes religious iconography with stories from history, biography, and personal narrative. In the poignant “Saint Catherine in an O,” a knife bears unlikely duality—an object stirring with danger and grace: “A man plays slide guitar / with his pocketknife, accompanying the words of his songs—/ one about light, the Lord moving on water . . . / how blood, he knows, will make him whole.” In other poems, he reflects upon master artists, who captured similar themes in their art though in different mediums. Brimming with poems that are quietly powerful, Vellum marks the arrival of a commanding new voice.