About this item
Highlights
- Constellation Route uses the form of the letter to explore issues related to contemporary American society: the environment, race, love, grief, friendship, violence, and spirituality.
- About the Author: Matthew Olzmann is the author of three collections of poems from Alice James Books: Mezzanines, which was selected for the Kundiman Prize, Contradictions in the Design, and Constellation Route.
- 100 Pages
- Poetry, American
Description
About the Book
"Constellation Route uses the form of the letter to explore issues related to contemporary American society: the environment, race, love, grief, friendship, violence, and spirituality. The book is largely a metaphysical tribute to both the Post Office and the act of letter writing as a way to understand and create meaningful connections with the world at large. A collection of mostly epistolary poems and odd poems about post offices"--Book Synopsis
Constellation Route uses the form of the letter to explore issues related to contemporary American society: the environment, race, love, grief, friendship, violence, and spirituality. The book is largely a metaphysical tribute to both the Post Office and the act of letter writing as a way to understand and create meaningful connections with the world at large.Review Quotes
A Rumpus Poetry Book Club Pick for November 2021
Longlisted for the 2022 Julie Suk Award
"In Constellation Route, we see an epistolary poetics that brings into sharp focus individual, interpersonal, and societal concerns, and that centers self-awareness and reciprocity as community-reinforcing principles."
--Issam Zineh, Hopkins Review
"Conceived as the assembled contents of a mail carrier's pouch, the intimate and affecting third book by Olzmann (Contradictions in the Design) presents the poet as sender, receiver, and courier. ... In language at once direct and artful, Olzmann memorably explores the question of how one might speak across the gulfs dividing humankind."
--Publishers Weekly
"It is Olzmann's talent--possibly his obsession--at finding meaning in the patterns of disparate elements of the universe that makes this a book I couldn't put down."
--Risa Denenberg, Poetry Northwest
"Olzmann's work is vibrant, tender, and, above all, honest about the loneliness of being ostracized from the world and ourselves. ... He writes to the dead, to canyons and trees, to river monsters, with language that reverberates like the grooves of a Motown record playing for an audience who, like the barkeep in "The First Official Post Office of the American Colonies (1639)", can listen in to feel the pure expression of loss and love."
--D.C. Eichelberger, The Arkansas International
"Olzmann's approach is direct, unpretentious, deceptively literal-minded: a subject is broached--Comic Con, unicorns, a younger version of himself--and made to render its meaning or its absurdity."
--David Woo, The Poetry Foundation
"Poet Matthew Olzmann's imaginative and inviting new collection, Constellation Route (Alice James), is, in its varied way, a celebration of the postal service and the art of letter writing. His addressees are wide-ranging: a pine tree, a cockroach, William Shatner, a bridge made of rope, a gone friend. The warmth and generosity of his tone remind a reader what a thing it is to be reached out to, to "talk to people who will understand you."
--Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe
"...a metaphysical tribute to both the Post Office and the act of letter writing as a way to understand and create meaningful connections with the world at large."
--Alan Chong Lau, iExaminer
"I would like to lease a plot of land in Matthew Olzmann's imagination. I would like especially to shelter-in-place inside his newest collection, Constellation Route. Each poem is, symbolically, a star--and also, often, a letter, elegy, and ode. Some of my favorite words appear in this book--salamander, psychopomp, incinerate, quibble, foist, satchel, and caterwaul among them. Between these covers you'll find a Wonderland of inventive language, profound image-making, and a missive to every reader of much-needed, radical joy."
--Julie Marie Wade
"Matthew Olzmann has long been a poet of exceptional wisdom and his latest collection is revelatory. Each poem reaches beyond the interior landscape to address the other in timely and intimate dialogues that bend, reframe, surprise, and ultimately embrace. Deeply perceptive, this series of epistolary poems are offerings to a new age in need of understanding where we are going, where we have been, and more importantly, what do we do for each other once we've reached our destination."
--Oliver de la Paz, author of The Boy in the Labyrinth
"In Constellation Route, Matthew Olzmann's sublimely playful imagination figures the poet as part Hermes, a conductor of dreams and messages; part Charon, guide to the underworld; and part United States Postal worker. It's a funny word, 'correspondence, ' one that Olzmann explores--its etymological routes--to reveal a cosmos of exchanges that delivers absurdity as easily as it delivers the comfort of our familiars. Olzmann makes these appointed rounds with humor, awe, and grace."
--Gregory Pardlo
About the Author
Matthew Olzmann is the author of three collections of poems from Alice James Books: Mezzanines, which was selected for the Kundiman Prize, Contradictions in the Design, and Constellation Route. His writing has appeared in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Brevity and elsewhere. He's been awarded fellowships from the Kresge Arts Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the MacDowell Colony. Currently, he teaches at Dartmouth College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.