Beforelight
(Paperback)
Publishing Details
Beforelight
By (Author) Matthew Gellman
BOA Editions, Limited
BOA Editions, Limited
7th August 2024
United States
Classifications
Physical Properties
Paperback
101
Width 152mm, Height 228mm
Description
Beforelight The speaker in these poems confronts the impacts of ruptured relationships and trauma on his nascent identity. These poems grapple with the fragility of our most formative relationshipsfamilial, communal and ancestralas the speaker searches for a communion with himself that his childhood deprived him of.
Again and again, the speaker must hide his authentic forms of self-expression due to the pressures of the closet, and as a result is forced to navigate the thrills and fears of secret desire and discover, ultimately, how not to make a life out of pain. Grounded, lyrical, tender and deeply psychological, the poems in Beforelightlay bare the search for self that, while difficult, provides its own reward for the searching and vulnerable speaker in these poems.
Reviews
"In Beforelight, Matthew Gellmans astonishing and sensitive dbut collection, family narratives unfold with the clarity and mystery of a photo album. Illuminating the brutal silences and blanketing snows of the suburbs, Gellmans poems make the world of memory startlingly intimate and alive."
Richie Hofmann, author of A Hundred LoversAuthor Bio
Matthew Gellman is a 2022-2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. His poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Narrative, The Common, Ninth Letter, Indiana Review, Lambda Literarys Poetry Spotlight, the Missouri Review, North American Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Night Logic, was selected by Denise Duhamel as the winner of the 2021 Snowbound Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Matthew has also received awards and honors from Brooklyn Poets, the Academy of American Poets, the Adroit Journals Djanikian Scholars Program and the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and his manuscript, Beforelight, has been a finalist for Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize, Four Way Books Larry Levis Prize, BOA Editions A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and the Alice James Book Award. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn.
