Ashes by Mike Matthews

Reading through Mike Matthews’ collection, Ashes, I’m reminded of the central figure in Eliot’s The Waste Land, who says of the crowd crossing London Bridge, “I had not thought death had undone so many.” For the citizens that populate Matthews’ poems, the line between existence and non-existence blurs, and they, too, are undone by an emptiness they cannot name as their “hours bleed away.” Matthews’ central narrative voice wanders these spaces as well, navigating his way as witness to the suffering of these figures, while seeking his own understanding of mortality, reconciling expectation and loss, and bracing for a future where only sand and ash remain.

–Brian Cordell, author of the book, In Their Final Performance

If life had a book of Cliff’s Notes, it might read something like Mike Matthew’s Ashes. You’d be left just as perplexed, after reading it, but a door of understanding would have cracked open, and you’d feel less alone. “I have left notes on the kitchen counter for me to find,” Matthews writes, but in these we find notes for us too. Ashes invites the reader into the soul of the poet, to unique and powerful places that are both specific and universal. Matthews tells us, “that I am on a paper road / that yellows at night and burns / on the edges of a day.” And somehow in doing so, in showing us this truth, also sets us free.

–Jenny Jaeckel, Author of House of Rougeaux, and Boy, Falling

Ashes arrests the reader in mid-stride. Stop everything, it seems to say, and listen and look and fill your lungs with infinity of being and not being, here and gone, cast off and retrieved, broken and mended. It is a work that pins ordinary moments and unflinchingly precise imagery in the same frame and asks us to hold them together in our consciousness for a long, transformative moment before they too become ashes, before we move on to our next breaths, our next steps, the next fiery item on life’s to-do list. It is at once meditative and passionate – a work of catch and release in the most beautiful of ways.

–Kristy Peloquin, author of Adrift: A Collection of Poems