Forge

Poetry by Ted Mathys

September 1, 2005 • 6 x 9 • 108 pages • 978-1-56689-178-3

A muscular debut collection.

Contemporary Ohio, New York, and Eastern Europe form the backdrop for the beauty and pathos unleashed in Forge. Reaffirming poetry’s place in shaping the perceptions of our world, these tensile, incantatory poems find lyric grace in shaping a poetics amidst the fragmentation of society.

About the Author

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.

Reviews

“This is some first book! It opens with a haunting twist on the creation myth, and keeps on opening into big poems that are architecturally complex and socially attentive. Mathys has set them all in a postmodern languagescape of juxtaposition and refrain. These poems leap—sometimes dizzyingly—but they always land, and always on some new connection, lighting it up.” —Cole Swensen

“With a kind of ‘all over’ technique, Ted Mathys miraculously forges words onto the page in a kaleidoscopic voiceprint of the present zoom of daily life. This book hums and chortles, sparks and pops out of ‘the mouth of your gift horse held / open like a zero.’” —Peter Gizzi