Product Details
- Publisher: WW Norton (2020-04-14)
- Language: English
- Paperback: 96 pages
- ISBN-13: 9780393357905
- Item Weight: 107.73 grams
- Dimensions: 8.25 x 6.09 x 0.25 cm
Luminous and hypnotic, this dynamic collection explores the dark edges of childhood, violence, race, class, and masculinity, by one of the most fearless poets of his generation.
"Known for poems of universality of feeling, expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending allure" (Major Jackson), award-winning poet Matthew Dickman returns with a collection that engages the traces of his own living past, suffusing these poems with ghosts of longing, shame, and vulnerability. In the southeast Portland neighborhood of Dickman’s youth, parents are out of control and children are in chaos. With grief, anger, and, ultimately, understanding, Dickman confronts a childhood of ambient violence, well-intentioned but warped family relations, confining definitions of identity, and the deprivation of this particular Portland neighborhood in the 1980s. Wonderland reminds us that, while these neighborhoods are filled with guns, skateboards, fights, booze, and heroin, and home to punk rockers, skinheads, poor kids, and single moms, they are also places of innocence and love.
About the Author
Matthew Dickman is the author of Husbandry, Wonderland, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, and All-American Poem, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. His other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Sarton Award for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
