Clay Matthews

Runoff Clay Matthews

Poetry. With RUNOFF, Clay Matthews solidifies his claim as the only real successor to the narrative, discursive line of Richard Hugo while extending that range to include the kind of hard & sparkling bursts of revelatory truth-won-through-trauma that punctuate the landscape of the best of Larry Levis. There's a howling emptiness that runs through these lines like a river washing through a prairie canyon--but there's a hopeful certainty too: that where it's going is simply where it's going & there'll be sunshine & clear skies someday.--Nate Pritts

Clay Matthews' RUNOFF is ambitious, recursive, and tenacious. Part weather journal, part calendar, part hiding place, RUNOFF is dense with Americana: skee ball and social security cards, spark plugs and scissortail flycatchers. Beverly's Pancake House and Roseanne reruns. A chicken-fried, not-quite-countrified Hamlet-of-sorts, Matthews says, 'I got some kind of faith / in some kind / of something, ' which is tender and optimistic in a world constantly 'making up neo- and post- and pre- and new names for itself.' Combining the cultural, natural, and metaphysical with ease, here is a voice that ultimately just wants us to 'witness the world / you little fools / and love it.' Literally letting his days run onto the page, an ordinary man takes us through a year of his (extra?) ordinary life. 'And stranger, ' he says, 'you are welcome to it.' Welcome we are, indeed.--Brandi Homan

Clay Matthews' RUNOFF is disheveled, bedeviled and worming with gargantuan spirit, a book so leaping with faith and flooded with urgent clamor the sky actually shakes when you read it. Wildly committed to the details, anecdotes and strange visions of a sample twelve month existence, this work is both serious and seriously EPIC--full-throttle accumulation, association, and radical attention. It's a major book from a writer who's already shown himself to be one of our best and most unconventional narrative-lyric poets. Your head will spin, your eyes will bulge, you'll think you could've done it, but you didn't (and you couldn't)! Put on your goggles and armor; you're in for a crushing, bewildering, and beautiful ride.--Matt Hart