Null Set

Null Set experiments with cool lyric surfaces—mathematical forms, axiomatic thinking, tropes of negation—until they rupture unexpectedly, allowing in the warmth of intimacy, fatherhood and spiritual hunger.

Null Set collects the slightly obsessive possibilities that rise when we give them the space—odd jobs, trouble-making, and farmboy rambling, all in dialogue with mathematics, or Faulkner, or other poets. Mathys musters the tropes of nursery rhymes and childhood observation to build reflections that lead to dark, complex work that’s provocative, rhythmic, and a little sly.

Publication date: June 9, 2015

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 72 Pages

ISBN: 9781566894036

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Ted Mathys is the author of two previous books of poetry, The Spoils and Forge, both from Coffee House Press. The recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Poetry Society of America, his work has appeared in American Poetry Review, BOMB, Boston Review, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MA in international environmental policy from Tufts University. He lives in Saint Louis and teaches at Saint Louis University.

“Mathys overloads the system, crashes the hard drive, and then sorts through the bits. . . . He meanders deep into stored memories for surprising, idiosyncratic details.” 

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“It’s deceptively cerebral, Mathys’s way of moving us.” 

—The Rumpus

“Spiritual crisis in the face of past and present ruin might remind us of Eliot, but here the stained glass windows of Christianity are broken.” 

—Rain Taxi

“Null Set’s task is to join the exactness of geometry with the messiness of poetry.” 

—The St. Louis Post Dispatch

“Explosive and lyrical.” 

—The Volta

“Intelligent and challenging while revealing a vulnerability that never reeks of weakness. Heartfelt and heady stuff.” 

—KDHX

“This book asks poetry for guidance in a time of doubt. It yields, in turn, work of hard-won astonishments, moving, intense and humane.” 

—Mark Levine

“Somber, surprising, pitch-perfect, and carefully intelligent, the poems of Null Set infuse me with renewed faith in poetry’s powers.” 

—Maggie Nelson

“This is wonderful poetry, full of intelligence without pretense, its art put toward a world of feeling.” 

—Devin Johnston

“What impresses most about Null Set is how very full it is, how much of life is here.” 

—Graham Foust

“[Ted Mathys] negates and reverses exhilaratedly, ending up somewhere near happiness, which may be a verbal state.” 

—Alice Notley